Help! killed 2 hard drives

[gorobei]

in short, something happened during a psu swap and both drives are majorly screwed along with a dvd burner.

WD 40gb ide: drive will spin up but then a loud clicking starts as the drive heads sound like they are hitting something.

WD 160gb ide: drive wont spin up.

Neither one is seen by the bios. I'm fine writing off the 160gb, but i have some receipts and other rebate forms on the 40gb which I NEED.

Question: anyone know or have any experience with one of those HD recovery techs/shops. Located in the SF bay area is a plus.

 

[undeclared]

You really should check this out with another PC.. I've had a similar problem which turned out to be the IDE controller rather than the actual hard drive/dvd drive..

 

[surfsatwerk]

In my experience that clicking noise means the drive is dead. And hard drive recovery by a pro is mucho dinero.

 

[nanaki333]

i'll never buy WD drives again. at my current job, and my last job, i've had WD drives just lose the partition table. it would say PARTITION UNKNOWN. and wouldn't boot or anything. the data was recoverable, but i had to reinstall. fast forward to building a raid NAS device. i decided to go with some WD 500GB drives cause they were on sale. i ordered 3 drives, all 3 were dead. wouldn't spin up, and 1 of them made a nice zap noise. i've never had an issue with seagate, so i'll stick with them.

 

[gorobei]

the drives were fine until i connected the PSU. WD brand is not the problem. The m/b recognizes other ide drives, so it's not an ide controller problem.

So does anyone have any ACTUAL experience with disk recovery services?

I've gone on craigslist and there are a few ranging from $40-50. One specifies that the drive still needs to spin in order to recover. But that may just be a guy with only a few of the necessary tools, the others don't specify any pre-requisites.

 

[lxskllr]

Real recovery services are more than $40-$50. If they can get the data at that price, then you can too using software recovery tools. If it's beyond that scope then you're looking at many hundreds-thousands of $ to get the data back.

 

[Wuzup101]

A few rebates and receipts are not even close to valuable enough to require professional recovery if your drive is dead. As lxskllr said, for $40-50 they won't be doing anything that you couldn't by using basic software recovery tools. Trust me, unless you have several $1000s worth of data on that disc... it is NOT worth it to have it recovered professionally if the drive has truly failed.

 

[Schfifty Five]

I say try this:

1) Install 40gb drive into another computer and see if it will be detected.
2) Try the freezer trick. Search google for the proper way to do this, but I think essentially you wrap the HDD in something water proof, then put it in the freezer for a few hours, then take it out and hook it up and you may be lucky enough to have to function correctly for 15 min which might be enough time to pull the necessary data out.
3) Get professional data recovery

 

[degibson]

Try Schfifty Five's suggestions.

As far as data recovery goes, there are two classes of 'professionals':
1) Garage types, which can help with perhaps 15-25% of disk failures, and charge something reasonable (e.g. comparable to that of a new disk). These guys are usually Linux or Solaris gurus, and often don't use any or much special hardware -- just a lot of sw tricks and patience.
2) Hardcore types, which can help with perhaps 50-75% of disk failures, and charge thousands of dollars for a recovery. Techniques vary, its common to replace disk controllers and open platters and such, hence why it is more expensive.

Often consulting class 1 will make it harder for class 2 to do their job, but not all the time.

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: lxskllr
Real recovery services are more than $40-$50. If they can get the data at that price, then you can too using software recovery tools. If it's beyond that scope then you're looking at many hundreds-thousands of $ to get the data back.

Well.. it starts at 250$ and goes up.. and thats from companies boasting 90+% repair rate.