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

[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.