[SGVLUG] Harddrive Recovery Firms

[Dan Kegel]

Well, there's Kevin Cohen, who might even be on this list...
he has a dustfree room for doing that kind of thing...

On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 7:33 PM, Mic Chow <zen at netten.net> wrote:
> Folks,
>
>  I have gotten into a situation with a laptop hard drive.  It has died,
>  and no there is not a decent backup.  The drive is a Fujitsu MHS2060AT.
>   It is not even being detected by the BIOS anymore.  Physically, I can
>  hear the drive spinning, but I can not hear the read/write head move.  I
>  have tried the freezer trick with this drive. (Air tight plastic bag to
>  contain the drive and put the drive in a freezer overnight)  I have had
>  success with this technique to recover other drives, but this no joy
>  with this one.  The 12-inch desk drop also did not help.  After doing
>  both separately, I mounted the drive again with a ATA/IDE to USB cable
>  to a boot from a knoppix 5.01 CD.  The KDE desktop does not show the
>  drive, qparted also does not show the drive.  Interestingly enough
>  sfdisk does give me something.
>
>  sfdisk -s /dev/sdb give me a value of 0
>  sfdisk -l /dev/sdb gives:
>    cannot read sector 0
>    /dev/sdb: unrecognized partition table type
>    No partitions found
>
>  If I read this right, the electronics on the hard drive seems to be
>  working right, or at least as far as the kernel can see it does.
>  However, it can not see the platters, or the data on the platters.
>
>  The drive is a single not-bootable partition with a file system of NTFS.
>
>  I do not have a spare drive with exactly the same electronics or even
>  the same revisions of the drive controllers, so it looks like I need to
>  send this out to a data recovery center.  Is there anything else I can
>  try at home to recover?  What if any experience has any of the members
>  here had with data recovery outfits?  Who do would you suggest?  Are the
>  all fixed on the $500 range or is that the initial rate and they go up
>  from there?
>
>
>  Suggestions?
>
>  Thanks in Advance.
>  Mic
>  North Hollywood, CA
>  N34° 8'33.02"
>  W118° 21'39.62"
>
>