Any experience with hard drive recovery services?

[tuftears]

My computer fried its power supply, and the disk went with it! Argh!

I've bought a new computer (not my first choice but when I gotta get back online in a reasonable frame of time, waiting a few days for a system to be custom built won't work) and have been reinstalling applications, but I really want my programming projects off of the old drive. I've heard estimates ranging from $129 to $500 or 1000.

Has anyone used these services? Recommendations? Suggestions for keeping the price down? The disks should be just fine, it's just the circuitboard that's fried on the drive.

Edit: I should add, the disk circuit board is most likely fried, so software solutions are unlikely to work. I've just heard back from one place that says 'Send the drive in and we'll give you a quote' - yeah right, you get to hold my hardware hostage before telling me how much it will cost?

Comments

[nekomavin.livejournal.com]

Depending on how modular the boards are, how hard would it be to get an identical drive and swap the PCB? Looking at a drive I have to hand, it seems as though it's designed to be replaced, and wouldn't require any significant amount of soldering. Of course, that assumes that only the on-PCB stuff died, and nothing inside the case did.

I can understand why they'd want the hardware to quote, though - the difficulty will vary a lot depending on details of the damage.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

I honestly dunno! It seems like it's a common thing for Western Digital drives of this model (WD2000JS) to die when the computer's power supply does.

What complicates things is that the drive has to be kept completely clean inside, so I dunno if I'm capable of switching the board without damaging that.

[alinsa.livejournal.com]

The board is outside the drive, not inside, so you could probably change it out in the middle of a sandstorm if you wanted.

The reason they want to "hold the drive hostage" is because on any given drive, recovering data could be anywhere from 'run some software that will retry reads a billion times until something comes off' ... all the way up to swapping boards, head assemblies, etc, and rebuilding files by hand. Or, if the place is high-end enough, going in with special hardware and individually reading the bits off the surface.

So you're talking about a $100 - $100000 job, depending. And it's hard to tell you which it's gonna be without actually examining the drive.

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

Swapping boards is a common method of doing this, and is something people have done at home too. Maybe try to persuade Tugrik or Revar to do it if you're not comfortable with it yourself. You'll need another drive of *exactly* the same model (and preferably firmware version) that works, as the organ-donor, but this should be doable.

-Deuce