extracting data from dead drive

---

gator0989 wrote:

my hard drive died and I'm being sent a new one. Is there any chance to extract the data (photos, music, documents, etc.) from the dead drive and getting onto the new one?

 

Impossible to answer.  You can try installing it as a secondary drive, or in a usb holder.  Sometimes yes, sometimes know.  That's why backup is so essential. 

thanks Rick. I had thought about plugging it in as a secondary drive since the bios does see it. you just confirmed that. that is my glimmer of hope. YES back up is most important, just wasn't sure of the best way to b/u 50g worth of music. I am getting an external drive as a backup once i get running again. thanks again

Just remember to turn the external drive off when not actually backing up or restoring from so if your PC is hit with some nasty stuff it wont get you backup files too.

I also suggest backing up pure copies and the a backup program instead of just one method to give yourself better options for restore.

thanks for the advice tphillips, thats the whole idea for the external drive, so i can isolate it from the system and turn it iff when not in useI have been shopping to put one together before this happened, just poor timing and poor luck. Anyone have suggestions on a good enclosure for SATA drive? looking to get WD5000YS drive.

So is an external drive better than haveing a dedicated internal drive.....

i guess i am missing somthing here....

if you back up and the files are infected i don't see how it makes a difference.....

---

Davet50 wrote:

So is an external drive better than haveing a dedicated internal drive.....

i guess i am missing somthing here....

if you back up and the files are infected i don't see how it makes a difference.....

 

If one maintains current antivirus, firewall and antispyware software there should be no infection. 

 

If an external drive is plugged into the machine or external power it's not truly isolated.

 

I use a standalone PC.  I plug it into the network and AC Saturday night at 10PM, and by Sunday morning all three computers have backed up (each of them has at least 2 partitions) over the network.  On Sunday morning the standalone PC is shutdown and totally disconnected.  Putting it in a fireproof vault would be the only other step to take.

 

In addition, each computer's data partition backs up hourly over the network to one of the machine's second hard drives, so theoretically I can never lose more than 59 minutes of data.