Copying Data from a HD w/a bad pin

[HanGuLE]

After roubleshooting I've determined that my haddrive has a bad pin (it shakes, it makes the noises...it has all the tell-tale symptons). Nevertheless, I'd like to retrive the 20GB of info that's the 60GB HD. My friend said he thinks he can contact a group that will do it for $100 + price of new HD> Is there another--preferably cheaper--solution?

 

[dude]

Bad pin? You mean a bad head?

That clanking sound is a magnetic head reader that actually reads the data off the drive platter. If it's clanking around inside, you've probably lost all your data.
Your data could probably be recovered if it was just a dead/fried drive, but now, the data on the platters are physically being scratched off by the loose head.

 

[HanGuLE]

Hmm. It might not be then. It shakes so that led me to belive it was, but I few times I could read the data but it started acting up again---even then I could only get it to regocnize the HD 1/2 times and this was based purley on chance. So, suppose the data is there....how can I save it? If possible? I don't mean myself of course...=/

 

[dude]

Try using a new board (PCB) from another drive of the same model. It might be a bad board on the drive.

 

[Rhuwyn]

I had a bad 15GB Quantom with a lot of data on it that i needed. I "borrowed" an Identical board and swapped it. I was able to get some data off of the drive but then the drive zapped the new board. 100 bucsk plus price of harddrive is dang cheap for data recovery deppending on what they plan on doing. I work for a System Builder and one time we had a customer that had an old server's hard drive go out. And they had not been doing their backups. We sent off the 2 drives that were mirrored by Windows NT to a company and they charged about 1900 dollors plus the cost of media. But this company had one of those clean rooms and a 50 thousand dollor machine with they put the plates into the extract the data. The data was worth a lot because of about 3 years worth of CAD drawings being on them so they paid but it was still expensive. So i would ask this company or person what they plan on doing at that price.