Data Recovery
 

Problem for the board. An idiot friend of my mine knocked over a Lacie external hard drive while it was writing and now it won't load (drive still powers up and makes clicking noises but won't load on my mac). Lacie is willing to swap out the drive (still under warranty), but there's about 500mb in total of data that I want. Given that most of the recommended solutions are $1000+ (which seems steep for a bunch of pictures) to recover everything, i was wondering if anyone had any other (cheaper) suggestions for recovering data. I'd be much obliged. . .

Thanks.

Probably not, if it is clicking software won'tdo the job and will in fact make it worse if you wanted to do professional recovery.

The clicking is the motors trying to spin and the heads clicking against the platters, typically happens when the motor dies naturally or on brute force like the drop made, if you did a professional company they would have take the platters out in a cleanroom and recover the data.

This may sound strange, but it worked for me. Remove the hard drive from the enclosure and place it in the freezer overnight. Remove it from freezer and re-install in the enclosure - try to read it immediately. If you can access the data, get it off asap.

The freezer trick does work for old HDs or HDs where the heads get out of line at times, but for a dropped HD it is more likely to scratch the surface of the platters making it very bad. Freezer= good for natural death.

If you cannot access your disk, either the MBR (master boot record) or FAT (file access table) is damaged.

There is a partition expert named Sven Olaf Mikkelsen who posted utilities that can recover damaged partitions:

http://www.partitionsupport.com/utilities.htm

These utilities reads the entire disk and find each file header and tries to reconstruct the MBR and FAT.

He helped me to recover a bad disk successfully via email. Obviously he is a busy guy and sending some donation can catch his attention better.

A few years earlier, we sent a bad disk to a recover house and it cost more than the PC.

The freezer tactic is for drives that will not spin up due to bearing problems. This is a case of physical damage.

This is a job for the pros. The more you play with the drive the less likely the pros are to be able to recover it and there's virtually no chance of anyone else getting anything off it.

They have to disassemble it and try to get the data off the platters. That's absolutely a pro-only job as it needs to be done in a cleanroom.

You can try Stellar Phoenix Macintosh Data Recovery Software for your data recovery need. It is not much costly and it is very effective and reliable software. I have used this software in the past, so I would suggest you to try this software. Try demo version first from here: http://www.macintosh-data-recovery.com/ after using it if you are able to view your data then Opt for full version and save your data.