On Tue, 2006-02-14 at 17:25 +0000, Stuart Fox wrote:
Not really worth it for personal data and mp3's etc but a few specialised companies offer data recovery services. In your case they would strip out the platters and attach them to a new head unit, recover the data and write it out to a new one for you. What they can recover even in some extreme failures is amazing. A company I worked for paid £5000 for data recovery once, they got everything back from a drive that had been electrically cooked. Very expensive but useful in certain circumstances. (we learned all about backups that day!) Its the same technology that *could* be used in a forensic case.
We have used the services of Ontrack Data recovery before for this sort of thing...prices are lower nowadays (it used to be a pound a MB !!!) The last drive I had to send to them cost me circa £500..but they charge depending on the size of the volume not the size of the data recovered...so big drives become very expensive.
For electrical only faults it is possible to get somewhere sometimes with a like for like board swap between (exactly) the same drives...there is unit specific geometry information on the board and of course lots of bad sector mapping info (both of which change between drives) but in extreme moments of being stuffed this has worked (to a degree) for me in the past.
The trick is to not mount the drive (one write with the wrong geometry will trash lots of data around it) dump a bit for bit image...mount the image loopback style and then try to repair the filesystem.
However I suspect that this gets less and less likely to work as platter densities go up.
Also I have since been told that this can be very dangerous...because if the geometry is too far out the drive firmware will think that lots of sectors have gone bad..and automatically start remapping them on the platter (even when the drive is powered but not mounted)...which then puts you in a far worse scenario than when you started.