[SGVLUG] Harddrive Recovery Firms

[Matt Wette]

I remember reading an article on the net once about how far someone
went to recover data.  He bought a duplicate drive and replaced the
electronics board.  Once he transferred the PROM from the broken
drive board it actually worked.

Dan Kegel wrote:
> 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"
>>
>>
>