Ways to revive your hard drive

    Am sure this is a problem we all would be facing and why wouldn't we be cause electronics are always  unreliable and tend to crash when you need them the most well most of them anyway. So the following are methods to revive your hard disk so that you can backup the necessary data for the time being.

   Now there are, broadly speaking three classes of data recovery, Logical, Electronic, and Physical.

• Logical : Where the FAT, NTFS or other file structure has been corrupted either by accident or on purpose or individual filed or folders have gone missing. The hard drive has not suffered damage to the components of the hard drive itself.

• Electronic : Component failure on the PCB (the circuit board on the bottom of the hard drive) in the motor or internally.

• Physical : Internal damage to the hard drive, damaged platters, head crashes, damage to the motor, or head rack signal amplifier. You need a clean room and plenty of experience to have any chance of a successful outcome here.

     A few things can be performed on a crashed drive before declaring it DEAD:

1. Touch the drive (or listen to it) to feel whether it's spinning. Some drives gradually suffer from spin-up problem but otherwise work fine once spinning. If it doesn't spin at power up, gently knock on the side the drive once or twice to jump start it. This works best if you knock on the drive approx. one or two seconds after power is applied. Repeat the procedure a few times and add a little more force if necessary. Remember that too much force can permanently damage the drive, but again, you have nothing too lose at this point.

2. If drive spins normally and stays spinning, try listening for irregular sounds emitting from the drive. A series of 'clicking' sound usually signifies multiple bad sectors including the boot sector that can prevent drive from booting. If drive 'Auto Detect' is enabled, make sure that its signature is shown at boot screen. If not, drive is certainly suffered from major hardware failure.

3. Check system's CPU to make sure it's not overheating (CPU can run warm, but should not be hot) due to a failed cooling fan, etc. Overheating the CPU can cause the system to be unbootable or cause the system to reboot itself frequently.

4. You could use another system to test the problematic drive to make sure that the controller is not at fault. Try both "Auto" and "User Type" (where you manually enter the drive's parameters) settings.

5. Try booting with a floppy and run 'fdisk' to view drive information. Some drives suddenly lost all of their data possibly due to corrupted FAT, but otherwise, continue to work fine once initialized and formatted. In many cases, FAT can be restored by executing Norton Utilities from floppy. If all failed and data from drive must be retrieved, you can try swapping its hardware (drive's main board) with similar working drive. Though this procedure can void drive warranty, but your data is more important, right? Or else, you try services that can save your data from dead drive for a fee.

     And after declaring the Hard Disk "Dead" you can perform either of the three following methods to revive your hard disk for a particular amount of time and backup the important data in it.

Freeze it :

        Well, I'll give you one advice that was a nice hero moment for me. Had a drive where it sounded like the drive motor was engaging but not getting anywhere, so we stuck it in the office freezer for an hour! I'll be darned if it didn't work. The drive was up long enough to get the data ghosted to another drive and we turfed it, even though it sounded fine at that point. I can't really take credit for it though—I had heard it in some geek session but I thought it was some jedi-geek urban myth. Goes to show you that you know you're really screwed when you say something to the effect of "Okay, hold on tight, I'm gonna try something I saw in a cartoon once but I'm pretty sure I can do it"

Drop it :

     Besides the typical use of system C: to transfer back the system files deleted during "housecleaning" by typical users, I've gotten lucky by turning the drive upside down and setting it on top of the power supply (which seemed to remove "a static charge" that had built up). Also have used various Disk Manager packages to "talk" to drives with FAT/NTFS corruptions just to recover the data. If drives are being reformatted from an operating system that doesn't want to "fully go away" (can name a few!), the disk manager software has also worked in this scenario many times to get rid of the old and allow you to reformat with the new. Of course, there's always the "drop it from 4-5" onto a flat hard surface" or "smack the side of the case with the flat of your hand" approaches. Believe it or not, both techniques have worked. Rumor has it that sometimes the heads "stick" to the platters during parking/cool down.

 And the following are the bunch of steps I would take if the drive weren’t being recognized by either the auto setup or manual entry.

1) Check your Master/Slave/Standalone jumper settings and make sure they are correct and
don't conflict with another device on the same IDE channel.

2) Check for bent pins on the connectors.

3) Try a known good cable—Floppy and IDE cables often seem to go down the gurgler at the worst possible time for some unknown reason.

4) Try a known good drive on your IDE channel and check the channel. If it doesn't respond:
• Try another IDE port (if there's two)
• Disable onboard IDE and try another I/O card (one that’s known to be good of course)

5) Try the disk in another PC.

6) Here's where it starts getting tricky. By now you must be reasonably convinced you have a bad case of galloping disk rot. On some drives (not all), if you have an identical same model drive, you can swap over the logic board. This will let you know if it is the embedded controller on the logic board. With luck, your disk will roar into life and you can suck the data off onto somewhere safe.

7) If your disk is making a hideous noise like a peg-legged man with a vacuum cleaner on a wooden floor (whirrr, clunk, whirrr, clunk....), then it is likely you have a dropped head. This is where you have start making decisions about how much your data is worth, because to go any further is going to cost big time and may require factory technicians to try and repair the disk in a clean-room environment. If your data was that important, then it would have been backed up. (Of course it would have been, they all respond in loud voices)

8) She's dead, Guys. How fast can you type? In a nutshell, this is my summary of the death cycle of a hard disk.

       And a minor disclaimer that all the above steps are performed by yourself full well knowing that your hard disk might blowup sometimes... So try this only if your desperate for the data in the drive.