Need some advice with HD issues

[Jassi]

I currently work in a research lab and one of the main computers there is giving hard drive issues. It displays an error saying "Missing Thread" and fails to boot properly. This computer has some data that hasn't been backed up on DVDs or external HDs for security reasons as it is a government facility.

Is there any way to recover at least some of the data from the hard drive? Are there any tools (software or hardware) that we could use to save the data from getting lost entirely? Would professional data recovery companies be able to help and if so, which ones would you guys recommend. Any and all help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Jassi]

Anyone?

 

[GalvanizedYankee]

I have no idea, really.

Some folks have had luck by replacing the logic board with an *exactly* numbered board
for the exact type&brand of HDD. The logic board can get harmed by a 5V spike.

Do a search of this board for DATA recovery because much has been posted, iirc.

A site I do some reading at http://www.hddguru.com/ Some of the guys here do head
replacement w/o a clean room and have had VG luck,ymmv however.

Consider this a bump


...Galvanized

 

[Lord Evermore]

If it's a government facility, you probably already have a list of approved vendors for data recovery. It's just money, and the government has no problem spending it, so just send it for recovery. If you start monkeying with it, you could end up making the data completely unrecoverable, at least partially.

The easiest thing to do is just put it in a computer that's working, and see if the drive can be read at all. If it can, then the partition and format may still be valid so you can just copy the data. If it's not read as a valid partition, then there are several software recovery applications that simply scan the drive bit by bit and try to locate the markers that indicate where a partition or file was, and recover the files that way. That's essentially what data recovery companies do, but they have much more sophisticated tools to do it with, and can even take the individual platters out to read them.