Dead Hard Drive

[xiphias]

So..my brother's hard drive has died. As I bought it for him, it's my duty to sort it out. Any pc that has this hard drive in, when turned on, will trip out almost instantly. Rang up the manufacturer, they said they'll RMA it no probs (it's only three months old). However they won't recover the data, but they'll recommend a company who will. Rang them up - £75 for a list of recoverable files, then between 500 and 1000 quid to recover them! HOW MUCH?

Does the manufacturer have an obligation to do anything about the hard drive data? As it's a physical problem, shouldn't they just move the platters into a new housing? Charging me 500 smackerals seems rather steep to me...especially as I only bought it about 3 months ago...

Yours

Pissed off of Sheffield.

[robbieduncan]

It's your responsibility to back up the data. Hard drives die all the time. The manufacturer have to fix or replace the product that they sold (the drive).

[aldi]

xiphias said:

Does the manufacturer have an obligation to do anything about the hard drive data? As it's a physical problem, shouldn't they just move the platters into a new housing?

I don't think they could offer any guarentees about your data, so its simpler for all concerned not to try. Moving platters into different disks is the kind of thing that the data recovery companies might do, but as it requires skilled hands and a cleanroom the cost is £££ (as you found out!)

[aldi]

Just remembered - I did try swapping platters myself once with a 40 gig maxtor. It kind of worked for about 5 minutes, then rapidly developed one or two bad sectors

Of course by 'one or two' I mean 'millions'

[esselte]

If the data on your drive is important then "Back It Up". Too late for you now I know but for the future.

[xiphias]

This was the backup. The original was dying so we bought the backup. About two weeks after the original died the backup went, before we could get a new master shipped in. Three months, which incl holidays and stuff, only was actually used for a month! That seems unreasonable reliability to me. Whats the point in a warranty then if you don't get it back? It's only a dead circuit board anyway...

[thepassenger]

If it's just the PCB that's gone pfut and your serious about getting the data back then perhaps a transplant?

But an identical drive and swap the PCB's over, it might be dooable might not... it should work well enough to maybe drag the most important data off the drive.

I'm affraid professional data recovery services are as expensive as hell; not only is it a captive market (i.e. pay up and get 'something' or don't and loose the lot) but it's a pretty expensive business, clean rooms and such cost a fortune.

[TheExcession]

Steve Gibson at grc.com has some pretty impressive claims about his Spinrite application.

I've used it to a degree to recover some data from an IBM DeskStart (DeathStar) drive. It only cost about $30.

Can you give a bit more info on what you mean by 'tripout'... doesn't give us much to work on.

What make of drive is it? Does the drive spin-up? Is it making any unusual noises? Can you even get to see the drive in the BIOS?

I made huge progress getting data off a failed drive by repeatedly heat-cycling it from the freezer to oven several times. Each time I'd get about 15 seconds of life where I managed to grab yet another folder's worth of data before it went in dead mode. Eventually I got everything off tha I wanted.

Ex

[Kinky]

I had severe failure on one of my drives a few months ago.

I ended up download an app off the web which was free and scanned your whole drive and then flagged up exactly what data it could retrieve.

They then charge you dependant on the volume of data to recover.

I got just under 50gig of data back for $110 - and worth every penny.

And before anyone asks - I do backup my data every night - but that failed too

I've now got 3 backup devices all running in parallel.

K

[TheExcession]

Kinky said:

I had severe failure on one of my drives a few months ago.

I ended up download an app off the web which was free and scanned your whole drive and then flagged up exactly what data it could retrieve.

They then charge you dependant on the volume of data to recover.

I got just under 50gig of data back for $110 - and worth every penny.

And before anyone asks - I do backup my data every night - but that failed too

I've now got 3 backup devices all running in parallel.

K

link?

[mph999]

xiphias said:

This was the backup. The original was dying so we bought the backup. About two weeks after the original died the backup went, before we could get a new master shipped in. Three months, which incl holidays and stuff, only was actually used for a month! That seems unreasonable reliability to me. Whats the point in a warranty then if you don't get it back? It's only a dead circuit board anyway...

Opps, feel for you, that's bad luck.

To be honest, 500-1000 notes isn't bad for data recovery - though painful when you have to pay it.

We (my company) paid over £10000 for one drive once, some muppet hadn't backed it up.

M

[xiphias]

TheExcession said:

Can you give a bit more info on what you mean by 'tripout'... doesn't give us much to work on.

Press button, light flicks on, then off, power supply needs cycling on hard switch.

[Zad]

One thing that *sometimes* works, is to get the electronics out of an identical model drive, and swap that board into the faulty drive. This may fail though if a) the actuator or spin motor in the old drive is faulty or b) The software has mapped out different faulty sectors in the new drive.

[Kinky]

TheExcession said:

link?

I've been racking my brain - and finally found them ...

www.binarybiz.com/

The product that I went for is the VirtualLab™ Data Recovery.

From vague memory, I had a [spare] 2nd bootable drive, so booted with that and made my origal drive a slave.

You download the software for free, and run it. It will then tell you exactly what files it can fully recover, and the total size of them all.

You then buy the required volume of data.

I see their prices have gone up!

Please note that it in my case it took about 5 hours to fully scan a 160gig drive, and a lot of the time it looked like it had hung as there was no movement on the 'progress' bar.

For reference: I have no association to this company in any way shape for form, other than being an extremely satisfied customer, where using their application saved me from major disaster!

And finally - I also took my drive to a well known PC retail organisation, who offer an on-site 'data recovery' service - and after a 30 minute wait I was told that the drive was 100% buggered and had no hope of recovering any data. Fortunately I did not believe them!

K

[[k]ar|]

What make/model is the failed drive?

If you're looking at trying to swap the electronics, not only do you have to match the make/model, but also the firmware and PCB revision. Can be very tricky with all the modifications the HDD manufacturers make on a seemingly ongoing basis - and I guess that you will have no way of telling what version/revision you will get when buying the 'donor' drive. It might be worthwhile looking for details of to interpret the serial number on the disk.

On a related note, how have you deduced it's a logic board problem?

[k]

[deva link]

xiphias said:

Does the manufacturer have an obligation to do anything about the hard drive data?

This is consequential loss, and I don't think anybody cover this for anything?

If you broke down and you missed a flight, you'd get the car fixed, but they wouldn't buy you a new holiday.