Hard drive failure's

ando

Lo,

Scenario:

You have a client, his harddrive is making unreal sounds.. you boot into a boot disk, fdisk :

'No fixed Disks present'

Right Mr X, I'm sorry to say, your harddrive is buggered, I'll order you a new one now and have you up and running in no time, but all your data is gone....


My question is, does anyone know of any companies that deal only with failed harddrives, and try get data back from them.. EG, if the read nozzle is broken, the data is there, but just cannot be read?

I'd rather send failed harddrives to a company like that other than throwing them in the bin :rolleyes:

seamus

Yeah, there's data recovery specialists around, but to call them expensive is a drastic understatement. Only useful if you had your nuclear missile launch codes stored on that HDD or if the cost of recovery is less then the cost of rebuilding the data from scratch...

No links, I'm sure someone around here has.....

BogoBot

AFAIK there isn't anyone providing this service in Ireland but;

http://www.ontrack.co.uk/

are pretty good. I have sent a dead laptop HD to them and had the data returned to me (on 6 CD's) in under 3 working days.

It is quite expensive though. The laptop HD cost me about stg1,000 IIRC.

Bogobot

Harmo

My hd died last week about 7-8 gig of mp3's lost for good . Started makin strange sounds so i decided to reboot as it usually fix's most problem's but it would not restart it sounded like it was trying to spin but i just didnt hav the energy

Saruman

Ah the good ole Quantum clunk!!

Listen most hard drive failures i have come across with ticking or banging noises are NOT a mechanical failure of the drive.. its actually an electrical issue.. in the case of Quantums its a certain philips chip that burns out.. sometimes visibly.. the drive and data on that drive are fine!! In the case of some drives.. if you get a like for like you can exchange the pcb board on the drive with little difficulty and you have your data back! Sorted!!! So remember that one in future.

ando

Originally posted by Saruman
its actually an electrical issue.. in the case of Quantums its a certain philips chip that burns out.

interesting, I might try that out tommorow. where did you learn this saruman? would there be any technical description's anywhere on the internet for attempting to change chips?

Occidental

You get an identical drive and swap over the controller board. It is secured to the drive via 4(?) screws and a ribbon cable. You shouldn't need instructions, if you look at the board you will easily see the connections. Be very careful with the cable, as they tend to tear easily.

ando

ah right, i taught he was on about a small chip on the board

donaloconnor

a lot of the times there is a way to achually fix that clicking sound u hear. If you take the hard drive and shake it hard for a few mins, it might go back in to place again. I'm being serious here. It often done the trick.

Have a nice day.
Donal