Recovering files from corrupt HD

[sOwL]

I'm not sure this is the right place for this, I apologize if it's not.

So this drive is driving me crazy, my client could really kill for all of his files back and it's been 2 days now with no real progress. The drive does spin, is being mounted in OSX, but randomly starts a rhythmic noise while trying to read and gets stuck. I tried my old good freezing method but I have had no progress so far. It is accessible and working for like a minute or two after I put it out of the freezer though. So I used blue ice packs to keep it cold longer, but i still literally have no more than like 2 minutes before it fails again. Any idea to make this thing last more? It's a small 2,5" laptop HD so it shouldn't need all that time to get frozen but on the same time it must be getting hot quicker too. I was thinking of actually putting it vertically in water and freezing the whole thing. Any ideas from the clever people in these forums? Thanx in advance

 

[derbothaus]

If it is mechanical issue very little you can do. You could try keeping the drive in a cold dry environment while trying to extract the files keeping it cooler longer. Usually this is the "told you so" about not having backups lesson.

 

[sOwL]

The thing is, the "told you so" is not particularly appropriate or even relevant since the guy is paying me money to do this. If he was my friend I'd be slaping the back of his neck telling him just that. Anyway, very strange that i tried several known linux recovery programs that failed, but "Disk Drill" app for the mac recovered a whole 60gb of files, more than half of them being actually important files and properly recovered. It was the only program that stopped the disk from getting into that 'clicking' mode and being unresponsive. It didn't even need to be frozen, I'm amazed. This program worths its money

 

[VanneDC]

did u try "data rescue"??

ive had several successful attempts with that proggy.

 

[derbothaus]

The thing is, the "told you so" is not particularly appropriate or even relevant since the guy is paying me money to do this. If he was my friend I'd be slaping the back of his neck telling him just that. Anyway, very strange that i tried several known linux recovery programs that failed, but "Disk Drill" app for the mac recovered a whole 60gb of files, more than half of them being actually important files and properly recovered. It was the only program that stopped the disk from getting into that 'clicking' mode and being unresponsive. It didn't even need to be frozen, I'm amazed. This program worths its money

You never specified that you can keep the thing spinning for periods of time. Data Rescue is great and saved my bacon many times. I always run Diskwarrior first as it either completely restores functionality or tells me the disk is physically bad. If it spins but is illegible, Data rescue is quite amazing using the deep scan features. It is either that dual combo or I have Drive Savers pamphlets. Which they never opt for as it is like over 1000.00 a gig.