Re: HELP! Hard Drive Gone Down - Is Surgery Possible?

Opinions vary on this, but I've found that putting a failed drive in the
freezer for an hour (sealed against moisture) can give you a few minutes in
which it can be read again. As it happens, I have one in there right now!

When you try this (if you do), you'll need to be able to mount the drive
quickly (before it warms up too much) so have the machine open and a ribbon
cable connector and molex (power) plug ready to go. I use a USB to IDE
adapter for this purpose instead.

Find out what jumper setting you need from the drive manufacturer's
website - if in doubt, try it on cable-select and then slave. (Have a tool
ready to pull the jumper off - a sharpened matchstick will do!).

Have a drive ready with enough space to hold the data you hope to recover.
Then you need to have a copy process set up. If the disk is functioning
physically but the data is scrambled somehow I use Acronis True Image to
make a sector-by-sector copy image and then unpick the image. If the data
is expected to be ok but the disk has physical problems then I use Robocopy,
a wonderful utility available free as part of the Windows 2003 Resource Kit
Tools:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&displaylang=en

You can plough through the Word user guide, or at least run "robocopy /?"
and boggle at the list of options, but in this case:
robocopy "path of source" "path of destination" /E /R:3 /W:1 /XO
.... will do the job. That tells Robocopy to build a mirror of the source
folder and all subfolders and files, retrying only 3 times (instead of the
default 1 million) and waiting between retries for 1 second (instead of the
default 30). The /XO options tells Robocopy to exclude Older files, so if
you run that command line repeatedly it'll skip those it's already managed
to copy. Test it out first on another folder, of course.

If that doesn't work (and a really tatty disk can appear to change between
Robocopy's "list" pass and "copy" pass) then you can't do much better than
to copy and paste using Windows Explorer. I had to do this on the last
drive I recovered myself - got almost everything in the end before it warmed
up!

DO NOT open the disk unless you have a clean-room available. If the above
tricks don't work, then you are looking at specialist recovery firms.
Retrodata are unusually good value, but I understand from a recent
conversation with them that they don't have a clean room available, so can't
tackle the very worst cases (but may be able to subcontract for all I know).
I've used EasyRecovery in Belfast (http://www.easyrecovery.net/ They were
worryingly erratic but they got the data back after thinking they wouldn't
be able to (cost £399 ). I had shorlisted Fields:
http://www.fields-data-recovery.co.uk/data-recovery/home.html
and "Data Recovery UK Ltd":
http://www.dataemergency.co.uk/

who both quoted similar prices. The most expensive quote I received for
that job was £2,300. Apparently my customer would have paid this...

Hmm... Time I backed up again myself ...

--
####################
## PH, London
####################
"Grooove" <grooove@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Xns970D979185F10d4v1d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Nige <nigel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
> news:131120051247271992%nigel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:
>
>> That being the case, I have been considering buying an identical drive
>> (Ebuyer is selling them for seventy quid) and replacing the
>> electronics board. Can anyone advise me on the viability of this -
>> whether this is going to be where the fault lies and what problems I
>> am likely to encounter...?
>>
>
> I would seriously consider talking to Duncan at
>
> http://www.retrodata.co.uk/
>
> He's not ridiculously expensive and knows his stuff..
> Could save you a lot of grief.
>
> --
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> David ~ Lincoln UK
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


.

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