[SGVLUG] Harddrive Recovery Firms

[Chris Louden]

I've used Ontrack.com. Personally and for work. Excellent service.
Expensive but worth it. If the circut board on the bottom on the drive
is bad its not that expensive. If something has happened to the needle
where they have to crack the drive open in a clean room can set you
back. I found out about them when doing some work for DOE. They have
gone through the process to get various DOD/DOE clearances to do data
recovery for the gov't.

On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 8:01 PM, Matt Wette <matt.wette at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 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"
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
>