[PLUG-TALK] Hard drive data extraction

[Keith Lofstrom]

Any good disk drive data recovery centers out there?

My father-in-law is a fine person, whose judgement is calibrated for
systems with moving parts far larger than electrons.  Computers are
not in this category.  Inevitably, a large part of every visit involves
restoring his Windoze computer to running condition.  This is not as
onerous as it appears, as it reminds me each time of what a blessing
Linux is, and why I don't have any Windoze computers.

However, this visit was a little over the edge.  His hard drive is
dead, and he made no backups of all the thousands of pictures he
has taken, even with the DVD writer we installed for the purpose. 
Interpreting his story, the drive (Western Digital WD400 40GB) has
been intermittently failing to start for a few weeks.  The failure
is no longer intermittent.  And we want the pictures back!

As best as I can diagnose, without proper tools, the motor controller
is broken; the drive doesn't spin, and there is no sound/vibration 
or gyro action.  The data is probably still intact on the platters.
On some drives, the main board can be de-soldered and swapped with 
another similar drive, but I don't know if that is true for this
device.  

So, time to spend $$$$$ to have a professional do it.  Any suggestions?

Keith

PS - after recovery, we move the data to another hard drive, of course.
Then, if he insists on still running WinXP, I will install a second 
hard drive into the box, and set it up Norton Ghost to copy the main
drive to the second drive every night.  If only I could talk him into
running Linux;  then I could back up his computer (in Maryland) to my
backup system every night (using dirvish/rsync, of course).  

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs