hard drive recovery question

Expensive, and possibly not even doable.

Tom

You can get the data recovered for several hundred dollars, but it may take a bit of time to send it in and you are not guaranteed the data will be recovered in which you still pay the money. You have to ask yourself, is the data really worth a backup. The fact that you opened the hermetic case in a non-clean room environment lessens the ability to recover the data at all and some houses may not even accept the drive.

It would be nice to have my data back, but its not crucial in any way..

My expertise is in computer forensics, if there was any way to get a bios to recognise my harddrive, I could then recover what i need, as the two files I am after are each less than 25kb in size. Is it possible at all to repair or replace the arm and heads, or transfer the platters to a different drive?

Thanks

In message , snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com writes

If your expertise if computer forensics, why did you open the drive, surely you would know that you stood no chance of repairing it and every chance of making it totally unrecoverable?

Yes, it is entirely possible but you need a clean room and lots of expensive equipment plus the experience to use it to do this with any chance of success on a modern drive. I *have* done this on a very old drive (20MB MFM IIRC, it was a long time ago) and successfully recovered data, but even on the drive I had it was a very delicate and tricky operation and you could actually see the heads and their connecting wires on that drive.

At this point I doubt anyone can repair it anywhere. If you can find a truly identical drive a recovery service may be able to help, but think $400 as the sort of price you will pay.

: > >

: : It would be nice to have my data back, but its not crucial in any way.. : : My expertise is in computer forensics, if there was any way to get a : bios to recognise my harddrive, I could then recover what i need, as : the two files I am after are each less than 25kb in size. Is it : possible at all to repair or replace the arm and heads, or transfer the : platters to a different drive? : : Thanks

If BIOS won't detect the drive, probably the circuit board on the drive was defective and there probably wasn't any good reason to open the HDA assembly.

You could probably buy an identical drive off Ebay just to get the HDA controller PCB off of it to replace the bad one on the defective drive.

This does sometimes work, though the newer the drive, the less likely it is. I ran a Conner 1.2 gig drive for several years after a board swap.

Opening it was definitly a bad idea, but so long as the platters have not been touched or anything fooled with inside it then it may still read fine for a while.

If your area of interest is computer forensics then you have rendered the forensic data on the drive null and void. Data recovery is now an extreamly remote possibility.

Had the drive not been opened it would normally be possible to have a data recovery house repair the drive and recover the data to a CD.

Last drive recovery for a client was a failed Novell data drive due to a single head going open. Drive repair was something like $50, data recovery to a CD was $1,600.

And never trust a drive after a failure, It's not worth it.

And yes I have poped the top on drives with striction and got them spinning without a clean room. Quick burn to a CD and install a new drive. Sometimes you are luck, mostly not.

Hugh

mirror

It wasn't area of interest, it was "expertise".

Tom