A co-worker handed me a failed Barracuda 7200 RPM 160 GB drive and asked if there was anything I could do with the drive to recover some files. There seems to be a mechanical failure as the drive attempts to spin up on boot and only occasionally does so. Even if it does start to spin, however, my system hangs at the bios splash screen if the drive is connected. The motherboard in my system is a msi 870A-g54.
I'm not at all optimistic about data recovery, but I want to give it my best effort. I'm wondering if my system's refusal to move past the BIOS splash screen is (a) expected behavior or particular to my setup and (b) can be circumvented. In the case of (b), I'm not willing to sacrifice my system for this hard drive, so if the halt-on-bios behavior is meant as a safeguard, I'd be interested in knowing that.
Best Answer
Use an USB to SATA/PATA converter, that should help being able to boot up to your OS, and then plugging it in. Zou also have multiple tries in one boot, amking the whole thing quicker.
This would have been a wise thing to consider before you attempted to plug a potentially dangerous, already half-dead device to your computer - you always risk everything you have connected to the power supply by just plugging in something unknown.
I'd also recommend using Knoppix, or any other Live CD to do the job, in similar cases I usually do a dd copy of the disk to be archived...