IDE Hard Drive crash - Need advice/help

RadFX · Jan 26, 2016

My brothers 5 year old Western Digital Blue 250gb ide hard drive crashed when in Windows. He was doing alot of torrent stuff, but the drive was fan cooled in a relatively warm environment. Bios takes a long time to detect it and then it comes up with a boot error. I tried it on a couple other PC's with a ide to usb converter but neither of them saw the drive.

The drive sounds fine and it sounds like it is initializing. I tried tapping it a bit, what else can I do?

Kursah · Jan 26, 2016

Replace it. Teach your brother how to backup his data to another drive so if this issue occurs you don't lose data.

You might be able to double bag the HDD, freeze it, and have a short window to hook it back up via USB and copy the contents to another drive.

Usually if the drive spins up, but is not readable, there is an interface issue...which could be a failed logic board. Its usually not worth trying to replace the board to recover the data...depending on the model it might be near impossible to replace.

Likely the drive has failed, and if you can get it readable, using CrystalDiskInfo, Speccy, AIDA64, etc. to read SMART data from the drive, odds are you'll see several warnings.

Tapping the drive won't help anything...impacts can cause the reader arm to contact the magnetic media and corrupt data...though usually you'd need to tap it really hard or drop the drive for that to occur. I'd say get a new drive, freeze drive, try to copy contents to new drive, and get a USB drive or second drive to mirror the original to prevent future issues like this.

Hope that helps! :toast:

Frick · Jan 26, 2016

Forget about it and hope he kept backups on the important stuff.

Processor	Amd Ryzen 7 Pro 1700@3.6Ghz
Motherboard	Asus Prime B350 Plus (needed pci slot for Ht Omega Claro Halo)
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IDE Hard Drive crash - Need advice/help

RadFX

Kursah

Super Moderator

Frick

Fishfaced Nincompoop