"Stellijer" wrote in message
...
Anyone know of any great web sites or discussions boards for reviving hard
drives which have failed fir data retreival?

I have two hard drives which failed within 2 weeks of each other before
backups
could be made of certain data. I'd like to research the best ways to
recover
the data.

In each case, it's a hardware failure and NOT accidentally deleted or
otherwise
corrupted data.

I'd appreciate any discussion boards where some experts might hang out or
maybe
some COMPREHENSIVE websites dedicated to this. So far I've found a lot of
information but it's all pretty basic and none of it worked. The more
information I can get, the better chance I have.


Let me mention just ONE of the cases here, just in case in addition to
information, someone here has some adivce:

The first drive is a 40GB Western Digital, 2-1/2 years old. It's been
used a
lot in the past couple years. Last weekend it quit spinning up. I'd like
to
get it to spin up JUST ONCE to get the data off. Right now, you can often
feel
the drive 'jerking' in an attempt to start. Just a little vibration here
and
there, sometimes hard enough to feel the drive try to rotate in your hand.
I've
tried twisting the drive as fast as I could by hand to get the platters to
spin.
While this caused more 'jerking', it didn't spin up. I tapped it as hard
as I
dared without wanting to cause damage. I put it in the freezer for a
while in a
static bag without change. Naturally I've tried different power
connectors and
a different power supply. It behaves the same whether the drive is hooked
up to
a contoller or just to a power supply alone. I just need ONE good
spin-up.


Occasionally you can make a drive like this work by swapping the circuit
board with an identical drive, the newer the drive is the less likely
this'll work though.