Repairing a hard drive?

[Jark]

Hello all,

I have a 300 gig drive that recently became non-responsive. It began as an occasional 'delayed write failure' error message popping up in Windows then soon after the drive wouldn't read in Windows at all. It's still detected in the BIOS at least.

From searching around I found a program called Spinrite which is supposed to be a great program for repairing hard drives and I tried it but the problem is that the ETA I'm getting from Spinrite is about 1 YEAR for it to fully do the drive.

My question is what other programs would you guys suggest for trying to repair my drive? I imagine I'd be limited in my selection since the drive won't read in Windows at all anymore. I'd like to be able to recover the data on the drive and maybe even continue to use the drive if possible.

Thanks a bunch for any help.

[White Haven]

If a drive is physically failing, then the best way to 'repair' it is to go buy a new drive. Now, if you're looking at data recovery, there're a slew of options, none of them, terribly easy, if recovery software is already quoting you ridiculous ETAs. At tha tpoint I generally tell customers that it's toast unless they feel like paying OnTrack.

[Jark]

I have no problem giving up on the drive, I have ample space with my other drives. Nor is the data on the drive important enough for me to invest a lot of money in trying to recover it.

I'd heard that Linux might have some tools that could do the job but I'm not all that familiar with it. I was just hoping to get a few programs which are generally considered good for repairing drives so I could do a little more research into them and decide which might be best for the task.

[Isil`Zha]

Oh there's plenty of ways to recover Harddrive data - unfortunately, most of those methods are extremely expensive.

But yeah, Spinrite with an ETA of 1 year sounds about right... we had 1 harddrive we experimented with Spinrite on at work when it failed to try to recover stuff.... after running for 6 months straight, it wasn't worth it anymore - any data that was lost had been recovered or rebuilt through other means.

Oh, and it was only 15% done.

[Vertigo1]

If the drive is failing, and you have data you would like to have a chance in hell of recovering, then stop using it! Unplug the drive from the system and order a replacement. Only when you have the replacement installed to you attempt any recovery operations.

Questions:
Is the drive physically hot to the touch?
Do you have any active cooling installed for the drive? (ie: fans blowing over it)

[Jark]

I have a large house fan that blows directly onto my case and external drives so the drives are always nice and cool to the touch.