Electronics Repair (sci.electronics.repair) Discussion of repairing electronic equipment. Topics include requests for assistance, where to obtain servicing information and parts, techniques for diagnosis and repair, and annecdotes about success, failures and problems.

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alfonso gayoso
 
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Default need advice on data recovery service company

I have a maxtor 40 gb hd that crashed.

bios won't recognize it and it makes and continuos clacking when power is applied.

Any suggestions for a good company doing data recovery service?

Anything I can try by myself?

Thanks in advance

al
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Chuck Chopp
 
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Default need advice on data recovery service company

alfonso gayoso wrote:

I have a maxtor 40 gb hd that crashed.

bios won't recognize it and it makes and continuos clacking when power is applied.

Any suggestions for a good company doing data recovery service?

Anything I can try by myself?

Thanks in advance


You will most likely find that the cost of the data recovery service is out
of the reach of the average consumer. Is the value of the data worth the
recovery costs? You could easily be looking at costs from as low as $2K USD
to over $10K USD for data recovery services.

Speaking from actual hands-on experience with computer data recovery, I can
tell you that the outlook for recovering your data isn't hopeless. In 2
separate situations, I've gone through the following procedure to recover
data from a failed hard drive. More often than not, it is the eletronics on
the controller board that fails and not the hard drive assmebly itself.
What this means is that if you can perform a "brain transplant" with an
identical "brain", you can restore your drive to functionality for long
enough to make a backup to a new drive.

What I would recommend that you do is to obtain another Maxtor 40 GB hard
drive that is the exact same model and has the exact same firmware code on
it. If at all possible, try to obtain a drive that was also manufactured in
the same year and month as your drive, perhaps even from the same lot #.
Searching on eBay or at any one of a half dozen or so online vendors who
specialize in obtaining drives matching these specifications will typically
net you some positive results and get you the drive you need to canibalize.
Then, carefully remove the controller boards from both drives and put the
good one on your hard drive assembly. As long as the platters, drive motor,
stepper motor and read/write heads are undamaged, then the new controller
board will be reading/writing the data in the exact same way as the original
controller board that failed. Worst case, you bought another identical
drive and trashed it for nothing. Best case, you bought another identical
drive and trashed it while managing to recover your data. In either case,
you're going to trash a drive and void the warranty on it, and you still
need to get an additional drive on which to permanently store your data, but
I've found it was worth the effort in the situations where I had to do this.

The first drive I did this on was for a TriGem 20 GB hard drive that was in
an eMachines brand PC. This was a 3.5" IDE HD and it had 3 years of
QuickBooks business records on it for the tae kwon do school where I train
at. The data had not been backed up and a power surge had damaged the hard
drive and the power supply module. I was able to successfully recover the
data from the failed drive.

The second drive I did this on was for an IBM TravelStar 48 GB hard drive
that in my laptop. This was a 2.5" IDE HD and although I run regular
backups on a weekly basis, I had just completed 50 hours of difficult
programming work and the drive failed just hours before my regularly
scheduled backups were going to run. Again, I was able to completely
restore all the data and move it to a new drive by going through the "brain
translplant" procedure.


HTH,

Chuck
--
Chuck Chopp

ChuckChopp (at) rtfmcsi (dot) com http://www.rtfmcsi.com
ICQ # 22321532
RTFM Consulting Services Inc. 864 801 2795 voice & voicemail
103 Autumn Hill Road 864 801 2774 fax
Greer, SC 29651 800 774 0718 pager
8007740718 (at) skytel (dot) com

Do not send me unsolicited commercial email.

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Jamie
 
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Default need advice on data recovery service company

off hand i would say no unless you want to pay lots of
cash.
if you wanted to waste some money you could get your
self another drive of the exact modal etc.
remove the drive board from the new one and mount it to the
old one.
as long as your head and lead wires are not damaged it should
work..
but i can tell you in many cases if you get the clicking noise
like that it is due to head damage or head wire breakage.. i have
even seen after closer inspection heads being dragged accrossed the
platter due to heads breaking off, no spin in the platter etc..
in that case you may not be able to recover much data.



alfonso gayoso wrote:

I have a maxtor 40 gb hd that crashed.

bios won't recognize it and it makes and continuos clacking when power is applied.

Any suggestions for a good company doing data recovery service?

Anything I can try by myself?

Thanks in advance

al


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Neil
 
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Default need advice on data recovery service company

The sound you are hearing obviously means that there is a physical problem
with the drive. It wont matter what driver board you put in, the physical
problems will still remain. This is why most people use inexpensive tape
drives for back-up.
I expect your hard drive will run you between 700.00 to 1000.00 to repair,
but home-use drives have a very bad record for data recovery.
-Kim

"Jamie" wrote in message
...
off hand i would say no unless you want to pay lots of
cash.
if you wanted to waste some money you could get your
self another drive of the exact modal etc.
remove the drive board from the new one and mount it to the
old one.
as long as your head and lead wires are not damaged it should
work..
but i can tell you in many cases if you get the clicking noise
like that it is due to head damage or head wire breakage.. i have
even seen after closer inspection heads being dragged accrossed the
platter due to heads breaking off, no spin in the platter etc..
in that case you may not be able to recover much data.



alfonso gayoso wrote:

I have a maxtor 40 gb hd that crashed.

bios won't recognize it and it makes and continuos clacking when power

is applied.

Any suggestions for a good company doing data recovery service?

Anything I can try by myself?

Thanks in advance

al




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Gary W.
 
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Default need advice on data recovery service company

Reinstall MBR (master boot record). Maxtor uses their own MBR
"Bootstrap". Download it from Maxtor's web site. Easy to do with a:\
drive boot. I've saved many with this. Also, be sure to check for
viruses. They can corrupt the MBR.

GW
--

On 8 Feb 2004 10:48:49 -0800, (alfonso gayoso)
wrote:

I have a maxtor 40 gb hd that crashed.

bios won't recognize it and it makes and continuos clacking when power is applied.

Any suggestions for a good company doing data recovery service?

Anything I can try by myself?

Thanks in advance

al


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