[PLUG-TALK] Hard drive data extraction

Bill Barry barryb at proaxis.com
Sat Dec 22 14:28:28 UTC 2007


On Dec 21, 2007 10:10 PM, Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com> wrote:
>
> 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
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An unfortunate incident with a laptop drive  led me to Dtidata.com. I
called several of the data recovery companies, but Dtidata was very
straightforward about what the process would be and how much it was
likely to cost. The cost was about half  of what one of the other
companies was quoting but was still about $800 for a 20gb laptop
drive. The turnaround time was reasonable and they recovered all the
data so I was satisfied. Warning, this was about 4 years ago. Since
then I have been using dirvish for my linux backups and Ghost for my
windows backups and hope to never have to deal with data recovery
again.

Bill Barry



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