I have a Dell Dimension 4600. My drive was an sata WD360GD. It was the main one and the computer just stopped finding it. It clicks too.
1)I got a serial ata card (connects sata drives to motherboards without them). And tried plugging it in to 2 other comps, still won't find drive, (whereas a year ago it did work)
Please I really need this info, any help would be appreciated.
Hi-
My name is John, and I work at Dell headquarters as a support analyst. I thought I might try to help you out, but given your situation, what I can provide is rather limited.
When a hard drive behaves as you're describing, it is generally a bad idea to try to get the drive to spin up, as by doing so, you may be causing further damage to the platters (where the data is actually stored). Every time you try, you could be destroying more of your data, literally. I would highly recommend you take that drive to a data recovery professional, and hope for the best. The service generally isn't cheap, but if that data is irreplaceable and important, it may be worth the cost.
If you only need to recover a couple of small files, one trick might work: put the drive in the freezer overnight, and try to boot from it when it is frozen. That sometimes works, but I'd only recommend you try it if you only need to pull a file or two from the drive. If you have 10 GB of pictures on that drive, don't even bother. Take it to a professional instead.
John
Dell Customer Advocate
customer_advocate@dell.com
Nice answer there John. I loved the freezer part. But don't u think getting prices down these days is compromising quality?
I have a Dell Dimension 4600. My drive was an sata WD360GD. It was the main one and the computer just stopped finding it. It clicks too.
1)I got a serial ata card (connects sata drives to motherboards without them). And tried plugging it in to 2 other comps, still won't find drive, (whereas a year ago it did work)
Please I really need this info, any help would be appreciated.
I have a similar problem, and I may have a partial solution:
a program called uneraser (www.uneraser.com) has a dos version for bootable floppy. With this program I can access most, if not all, of a 400gb sata drive on my sata-usb adapter. If I try to access the drive in windows xp I get into a loop which requires a restart.
You might be able to recover some data with that program.
Get another hard drive. Install another OS on it. Plug this hard drive as an external and try to recover data. I did it the same way from 4 of my hard drives which crashed. And get your power supply checked. My power supply was bad and had to get 4 hard drives RMAed because of it.
Cheers,
sarkar
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