Is it possible to get data from dead harddrive?

[Egrimm]

A couple of days ago I tried building a new system with with an ECS K7S5A board until suddenly smoke came from the machine, though it was a bad mobo (wouldn't suprise me with that board) later, when I was building another machine with the MSI K7T Pro2 RU I tried putting the harddrive (an old IBM Deckstar 34Gxp 20Gb drive) in and it couldn't detect it at all. So I took a good look at the drive and one of the chips on it have a burn mark (sorry, no scans).
Is it possible to acces the harddrive just one time to get the data from it to another drive, I don't have any strange ideas of making it work, I just want to copy the data from it to another drive and then throw it away for good. I asked a local shop and they said that they might be able to do it, but they also want much money

 

[Kartajan]

bad news-

your information is accurate. (I doubt they have the equipment or facilities to do it themselves- I beleive that they farm the job out to somebody else. Clean rooms aren't cheap......)

 

[Egrimm]

The strange thing is, they only want money for "normal service", so they might do it themselves. Another option would be to have the harddrive sent to IBM, but then I'm not sure to get the data as they might send a new disk instead of repairing the old.
The disk only had 16Gb movies on it so its nothing really important, but many of the servers where I got the movies from are down now so I don't know where to get 'em from again.

 

[Zepper]

It used to be possible to swap circuit boards from a drive of the same series to get to the data. Worked on some WD drives.
.bh.

 

[Mitzi]

Sounds like you have lost your movies for good, my friend. Not really much you can do if you don't have the £££ to pump into data retrieval.

A few weeks ago, the drive which held all my archives died, I lost all my university work and MP3s (loads of rare Bruce Springsteen stuff). It took years to build up the collection and I didn't have any backups so therefore I've no one to blame except myself- lifes a bitch!

If you return the drive to IBM for an RMA they will only replace the drive if it is still under warranty - they will not retrieve any data.

We all live and learn from our mistakes I guess!

 

[Egrimm]

There's still warranty on the drive, IBM drives have a three year warranty (at least here) and it's a little less than 2 years old (22 months or so). The man in the shop siad that they might repair the drive, but he also said that they might retrieve the data from the drive, and it wouldn 't be THAT costly for them to do it (50-100$), so I don't know if he really know what he talks about.

If I could find a similar drive I might try the cirquit-board changing trick that <FONT face=Verdana size=1>Zepper </FONT>mentioned, as far as I know it should work on this drive too, it should be possible to take cirquitry out and change it with an identical on most drives if you are very carefull and are in a nearly dust-free room. Shouldn't be more problematic in that regard as those who make window-mods to their drives.

<FONT face=Verdana size=1>Mitzi</FONT>, you are right, it's my own fault for not taking back-ups, but cd's take up much space compared to harddrives .
Anyway, when I get the two Deckstar 75Gxp 75Gb drives which a friend said he could get cheaply I'll set up a raid-array (raid 1) on my MSI K7T Pro2 RU, I knew I would need the raid-controller (my old mobo, MSI K7T Turbo Raid also had raid just in case if I should need it).