Hard drive data recovery - help needed

I have 2 old PCs that I'm in the process of scrapping. I took both to a local PC repair shop I've used before. They pulled the hard drive from each tower and worked on pulling the relevant data files from each. The newer hard drive cooperated just fine. However, the older hard drive would not cooperate. I don't know from a technical perspective what the issue was, but they reported that they were unable to extract any data from it. It's a very old Seagate 20GB drive, manufactured on 8/30/01. The owner told me that it could be sent off for a more forensic approach, but that it would likely cost $600-$1,000 for the process. 

My hope is that the bright minds here can offer a better alternative. All I care about are the photos that are on the drive. Thanks in advance for help and insight!

The important question here is if the drive spun up, but was unreadable or if it didn't spin up at all. Sometimes there are ways to convince a drive to spin up, but if it does and it is unreadable you're probably looking at a data recovery company that has a clean room and is able to open the drive. That's the $600-$1000 quoted above.

When I need stuff like this done, I ask a computer-nerd friend. The last time I needed something like this, he pointed me to an adapter that allowed removing the hard drive and turning it into something that acted like a USB drive.  But you need to know what kind of drive it is and the connector it uses. 

This reminds me that I have a few old computers I need to do this to.   If mainly to archive old photos onto thumb drives. 

a usb adapter likely won't help in this instance. 

Likely something with the hard drive is broken. Hard drive recovery isn't recovery as much as it is fixing the hard drive and pulling your data off. They usually buy the same hard drive, and move parts over to it. the 600-1000$ is about right. you're not going to get a GRM solution for this one. 

Yeah if the drive itself is physically broken in some way, there's little to nothing you can do other than paying a professional data recovery shop. If it's a filesystem-level problem on the other hand, then there's little to nothing a professional data recovery shop can do that you can't.

First put power to it and see if it spins up - you should hear it and feel a gyroscopic effect in the drive. If it does spin up, the next thing to try would be to put both power and data cables to it and see if you can view a partition table on the drive with something like gparted/fdisk on Linux, or diskmgmt.msc on Windows. If you can, then you'd use ddrescue to copy off as much raw data as you can to an image file so you have a backup (which could soon become your only copy), and then you could try data recovery tools (like photorec and recuva) on the drive or image file.

My experience with failed server hard drives is the more you "play" with them trying to see if they will reboot and/or spin up, the more you doom your future data recovery success at the expensive forensic place.

Like others have said, if the original place tells you that it won't spin, then don't try any DIY stuff - just take it to the expensive place. (Sometimes the expensive place will be able to show you what they can recover for a modest fee and then once you say "OK" they do the actual recovery for the big money.)

Thanks everyone. So how do I go about finding one of the fancy clean room companies?

Throw it in the freezer for 15-20 minutes. Then plug it in and see if it spins up.  If it does, quickly get the data off that you need.  You might be able to get away with that trick more than one time. 

mattm said:

Throw it in the freezer for 15-20 minutes. Then plug it in and see if it spins up.  If it does, quickly get the data off that you need.  You might be able to get away with that trick more than one time.

I'd only try this as a last resort, this technique rarely works and hard drives rarely survive more than 2 attempts.

Then when you are done, go get yourself a Synology NAS and run two drives in RAID and sleep easy every night!  

93gsxturbo said:

Then when you are done, go get yourself a Synology NAS and run two drives in RAID and sleep easy every night!  

Better to get 2 separate single-drive NASes and keep one offline, in case of ransomware for example. RAID is not a backup and only protects against one very specific cause of data loss.

GameboyRMH said:

93gsxturbo said:

Then when you are done, go get yourself a Synology NAS and run two drives in RAID and sleep easy every night!  

Better to get 2 separate single-drive NASes and keep one offline, in case of ransomware for example. RAID is not a backup and only protects against one very specific cause of data loss.

I guesss I should have elaborated.  My RAID is sending a backup daily to another NAS running on another network a few miles away. Plus photos and stuff are on thumbsticks at my parents' house and in a desk drawer at work too.  And if someone really wanted to ransomeware my old episodes of COPS and Next Food Network Star I would just wipe the drives and let them suck eggs.  

If the drive doesn't spin up, you can try giving the drive a whack. softer at first and harder until it spins up. Have everything ready to copy the drive because you only have one chance. I have done this once but it was a server quality ( scuzzy ) drive. I hold a screwdriver by the metal and use the handle as the hammer head. Hitting too hard could cause a head crash.

Anyone use Spinrite ?

It is supposed to keep trying to start the HD after regular Windows stops , 

So say Windows makes 5 attempts and gives up , Spinrite makes 20 or more attempts. at least that's how it looks to me ....

I've heard of it...you can do the same thing by reapplying power to the hard drive though. There are also free Linux tools that can send a spin-up command.