hard drive recovery?

[amethystmoon.livejournal.com]

Does anyone know of a place in the area that can do hard drive recovery, other than Microcenter or Best Buy (which I'm already looking into)? I've been doing some looking online, but my hard drive is clicking, and a lot of places seem to say they won't deal with that.

Alternatively, does anyone in the area have an Archos Gmini MP3 player, and could lend me the charger for a bit? I used mine as my backup hard drive, but I lost the charger and the battery is presently dead.

Edit: Thank you all for advice and suggestions. I've found a charger for the Archos, and I'm going to try a couple more at-home efforts with the hard drive, involving different boards, the assistance of a kind LJ neighbor, and possibly this fun-sounding freezing option, and chalk it up to a loss if they don't work. Who knew clean rooms were so expensive? ;)

Comments

[jaypee.livejournal.com]

Basically, you need to stop doing whatever you are trying to do if you even want the chance to recover any data. I'm going to let you know already that it's going to cost about $1,500 + for a standard hard drive. Raid is far more expensive (2-10X as much). It's going to cost you $300-500 just to have it looked at and to get an estimate (both of cost and probable recovery percentage), but companies will usually credit you with that amount if you choose to recover with them.

It's not cheap, because they physically open the drive and remove the plates in a clean environment, and then place them in special machines to read the data. They also have to use some high level programs running on high end systems to run the algorithms necessary to put the data back together. If it is a physical failure (which is what it is sounding like), then this is the only way to get the data.

Even then, it's not a guarantee that they will get everything. I've used Excalibur Data Recovery (http://www.excaliburdr.com/) at my company a few times, and they've retrieved everything so far. Most of the time people shy away from the cost, as it's for those instances when you simply must get your data back.

My suggestion is to take as a loss, and take it as a lesson to make sure you have multiple backup sources for your data. It sucks, but it happens.

[spud.livejournal.com]

Actually, they only physically open the drives if they are dead, or the heads are locked tight. A great deal of the time, the drive ends up clicking due to problems with the controller on the circuit board and not specifically a mechanical issue. In many cases, swapping the board will resolve the problem to the point where data can be pulled off. In rare cases, freezing the drive will work when the issue is more of a mechanical nature. This is tricky, as you often need to freeze, recover, freeze again, recover more. I've used the method several times in extreme situations with success when nothing else short of platter swap would have worked.