[SWLUG] ot: hard disk recovery

[Justin Mitchell]

On Thu, 2007-06-28 at 01:06 +0100, bascule wrote:
> my brothers hard drive has failed badly, it spins but refuses to give up any 
> information returning read errors upon every access, listening to my brothers 
> story i believe that something electronic has burnt out and that the only 
> hope for recovery is one of those expensive labs that swap out boards from 
> working drives and even sometimes remove platters in clean rooms, bro's data 
> isn't worth that much (he marries next week and the drive has his 'wedding 
> plans' on it, not sure what that says!), but i was wondering, there being 
> quite a geek collection on this list, if there was someone who did have some 
> equipment that might help - all i have is standard pc stuff to plug the drive 
> into i.e. a mobo :) or someone training/dabbling in forensic stuff who wanted 
> to practice on a drive that has been given up for dead, then maybe something 
> could be worked out? feel free to email direct.

if it was something that burn out then you might be lucky and find
someone with an identical drive that you can steal the controller board
from, you would need to tell people the exact model number for that i
would think.

but to my mind, if it was the controller board that was gone then it
just wouldnt talk to you at all, so its more likely that the surface or
the heads have been trashed, in which case your only hope would be the
clean room rebuild and even thats not guaranteed.