[overexplanation]Last night my Gateway NV59 worked perfectly. I closed it up for standby mode, placed it in my Wenger bag and went to bed.

Today I broke it out only to see it's been froze at the bios and I hear this faint *beep-beep-beep-beep* repeating. Apparently it takes 15 minutes to fail on their bios before showing me OS not found. My heart sinks.

I remove the drive and put it into a Vantec SATA dock. Same sound. I have never heard this before in my life. Did hard drives suddenly get diagnostic codes in the past years or what? After some extensive googling I find out it's most likely the platters are siezed up and what I hear is just a repeated failing initialization (spindle stuck?). Gateway insists that I run some bullshit GWSCAN utility and the rep won't accept that the HDD is physically out of the laptop and will not post in less than 15m otherwise. She finally agrees I don't have to pay to send it back, but that I may choose an advanced RMA (CC of course...) exchange for a new HDD.

Fuck if I care about that or the $115 hold on my card for an obviously defective drive, I want to try my damndest to get back some or all of what was on it. Being that it was really only 2 months old I haven't even began to think about dumping the some odd 20 ISO images of daily use software for all of my clients. I was just getting started collecting.

HDD has been triple bagged and in the freezer for about 30 hours (I always promised myself I would try the lifehacker 'myth or truth' method if given the opportunity. My dilemma lies in the $115 hold they have on my CC if they get the old one back with the sticker cut right above the last torx screw. Would a heat gun melt the adhesive enough to peel back undetected? Should I try a few light rubber mallet whacks? Any advice or input (trolls can pad) would be much appreciated.

We just recently had a Raid5 restore done for a client that I was 60% sure if I had another week and the backplane from fregac (ahem..FLAKE) I could have solved myself. They had insurance, but the bill was 10 grand. My few non-dropboxed files and ISOs are not worth that, but I would love to make an attempt. [/overexplanation]

Samsung Momentus 5400.6 btw.

Thanks TT,
Brian

[Edited on April 17, 2010 at 1:01 AM. Reason : .]

4/17/2010 12:41:47 AM

Freezing did nothing. I misguessed where the last covered torx was. cut a small square in the sticker to remove and re-superglue hoping no one would notice. I ended up grabbing some rubbing alcohol and a qtrip and just disolving the adhesive -- it came off without a problem.

I freed the platter with a torx driver (clean room not an option unfortunately) but it's almost as if it's somewhat bent now because it wont turn a full revolution without getting stuck again. I'm afraid to remove it, touch it or do anything, but I really. really. want this data.

4/17/2010 6:24:23 AM

a data recovery company might be able to help...no guarantee though that the iso files will be fully saved....but it if its that important it might be worth it. Expect to pay quite a bit of money and wait a couple of weeks.

4/17/2010 7:36:16 AM

^^^ flake? how so? fregac never responded to my calls or messages about piece of hardware he sold me that broke...

[Edited on April 18, 2010 at 11:26 PM. Reason : ]

4/18/2010 11:26:28 PM

FYI, don't use a 35k rpm dremel to free a stuck hdd platter.

4/21/2010 12:08:35 PM