Hard drive failure and location of user folders

[Holy Cheese]

Hi Gents,

 

This week I unfortunately suffered a HDD failure which is causing me a bit of grief.

 

A couple of years ago, due to space running short on my C:\ drive, I relocated the documents, downloads etc folders to my D:\drive this is the drive that has now died on me. As a consequence I have now lost everything that was stored in these user folders.

 

The drive is completely dead, have tried everything I have read on the net, but I have not been able to find any way to recover these folders. Does anybody know if this is at all possible?

 

Thanks for any help.

 

Jack

[John Dow]

Dead hard drive?  Sounds terminal.  If it doesn't spin or attempt to spool up, I have read of people getting the exact same model drive and swapping over the control board, but I'm not sure of success rates.

 

I had a work pc once that wouldn't boot up.  Nothing we tried would make it go past BIOS.  So I dropped it on the desk, by allowing it to fall directly on to it's base from a vertical position (It was a flat desktop pc) which I guess was the equivalent of allowing it to drop dead flat from 12-18", and the shock freed up the heads and it booted normally.

 

HDDs are pretty robust so a moderate amount of percussive maintenance isn't likely to damage it if the heads are stuck and need to be freed up.

 

Good luck.

[Holy Cheese]

Thanks John for trying to help.

 

I've googled a lot and found a video showing how to open an HDD and to free up the heads, but unfortunately the heads were not stuck so I guess I am stuffed. The drive was manufactured in 2012, so I reckon it has gone to meet its maker, as they say.

 

Cheers

Jack

[Smudger]

3 hours ago, Holy Cheese said:

I reckon it has gone to meet its maker, as they say.

Hello Jack

Have you checked out this site and article = https://www.cleverfiles.com/howto/dead-hard-drive-recovery.html

It sounds as though it may be a help to you

 

 

[Nick Cooper]

Hello,

I recently had the same problem, my PC refused to boot at all, until the 3 GB E drive was unplugged.

Thereafter, the motherboard developed more faults and had to be returned under warranty.

I replaced it with a different brand with a newer chipset but the E drive, although plugged in and supplied

with power simply failed to appear in the BIOS, Windows Explorer or indeed the Windows Disk Manager.

I cannot see how, without specialist hardware, any data could be recovered in those circumstances,

so it went into the bin. 

Fortunately, I had backed up all the data, so a new HDD has replaced the old one and the backed up

data is on it.

 

[Holy Cheese]

Hi Smudger,

 

thanks for the link, hadn’t seen that one. I had already opened the HDD to see if the heads were stuck, they weren’t. May now have a look at that USB option they mention.

 

Nick, thanks too for your input. I suspect you are right about needing specialized hardware.  My OS was on a different SSD but thanks to parts of certain programs being saved in C:\ this is now a problem. I installed P3D v5.2 and tried to run it but although this is a fresh install it still recognized the old scenery.CFC on C and threw me up over 400 errors - so I just used the task manager to quit.

 

I don’t know if the command to delete generated files will help me out here, or if my best bet is to bite the bullet and re-install Windows 10.

 

Thanks for your interest.

 

Jack