Hard Drive died. Need help getting data off it ASAP

well, if the data is very important to you, you could always send it to a data recovery company. Other than that, i would have suggested exactly what you did.

There is an old trick. Put your drive in 3 freezer bags (one inside the other), put it into the freezer for 2-3 hours. Put it back into your laptop, then get the data off as soon as possible. Hope this works for you.

well, thats if the head is stuck to the platter, which you should be able to hear. Is the drive clicking under operation?

Run a copy of linux that can boot off CDs. Get your data and then reformat/send the dead drive in. If you reformat then choose full format as that will elimate bad sectors. I suspect the drive is dying though.

well what I would have recommended back when u just got the boot error and it told you to run CHKDISK, is, you should boot off a linux boot cd like pclinuxos and copied as much data as you can like it is because linux is very good with dead/dieing drives, not to mention cp will countinue copying even if files get a IO error and most windows copiers error out, then run the checkdsk and try the linux option again.

My dad had a drive which suddenly got bad sectors, luckily with my action I was able to get most of the files off of it in the first run except his music collection, he has 200 GB of wav/mp3 files he copied from his CD's. unfortionately I couldnt see all the files in the directory because a lot of the directories werre corupted, but after running the check disk, it errored out at like 65% at stage 3, same as you I believe, same error, but atleast I could see the files now, I was able to get all his data off but 10 or 11 music files which he was able to easily copy off his cd's. not to mention u can output the error log to a text file to have a log of all the files that didnt copy, IE: cp /mnt/win-c/* /mnt/usb/ 2> /mnt/usb/error.log

Oh yeah I almost forgot to mention, windows wouldnt even see the drive, it didnt even see it as an NTFS partition, this is why I like linux heh.

I had a harddrive die like that a year and a half ago. Windows would not recognise it and it would crash linux. I think I was really lucky because PCI recovery was able to retrieve my data, but the MBR was fubar.

try SPINRITE www.grc.com or i guess you could try to torrent it but its really worth the cash'!!!

SpinRITE 6 its written by a guy named Steve Gibson, amazing tool been using it for years.

I had the same problem recently, tried everything, but no go. My files were crucial. So, took it to the local geek's shop with a new Hitachi. Within two hours he had the HD mirrored on the new disk. $20. Don't know what he did but it was worth it. The moral of the story is that if your data is crucial, and you aren't getting anywhere, take it to your small local shop, ask them beforehand what they'll charge for a successful copy, and come back when they are finished.

Dunno if you can, but try safemode.

Safemode won't work, the MBR is screwed. Linux live cd would be my suggestion. Barring that you can also try some of the utilities on the ultimate boot cd.

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I am actually in charge of datarecovery here in the company too...
I'd try it with a BartPE CD or a LiveCD and EasyRecovery tool from Ontrack, my quote is 99% successfully ( at least )

I used to save my data by buying a new HDD with the same HDD model and then swapped the PCB board and copied everything out. Put the board back to the new drive and then install the OS and then rstore the data.