Data Recovery Service

[percy2]

I have a 300g Maxtor ide HD.

The motor/spindle has seized.

Any body any recommendations for a Data Recovery service / preferably in house, reliable and cheap as chips?

Is your recommendation based on first or second hand experience?

How much will this hurt financially?

I hang my head in shame for not having a back up.

Cheers

[hbert]

Have you tried the freezer trick...?

If not, put the HDD in your freezer for a couple of hours (as cold as possible).

Then quickly take it out and connect to computer. You might get it to run for a while so that you can copy the content....

Repeat this operation until you have got all content copied.

You better do this operation in an air conditioned room to avoid condensation on the electronics on the HDD.

It might be worth a try...

[simcity]

I have a 300g Maxtor ide HD.

The motor/spindle has seized.

Any body any recommendations for a Data Recovery service / preferably in house, reliable and cheap as chips?

Is your recommendation based on first or second hand experience?

How much will this hurt financially?

I hang my head in shame for not having a back up.

Cheers

I was ready to post last week here for same problem, but the HD is in france and i am doing that for my brother !

i done a search on thaivisa and got this link & telephone to them, price was under 1000baht for a 40 g !

http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/index.php?sh...p;#entry1570692

I just had a Data recovery issue, with a Seagate external drive... Not sure what caused it.. a bad box coincidental with a power failure, and NO UPS.. something.. Anyway.. Got Blue-screened and then Windows started to wipe my data... I lost a lot.. including about 7,000 MP3, and my Resume. The failure didn't wipe the whole drive.. but still.. I have Data going back 20 years on this drive.

I found this shop on 4th Floor of Pantip that was able to recover about 71 % of my data, But not my resume.. Bummer ... I just picked it up today (Tuesday). I Brought it to them on Saturday.

The Shop name is P-Care Computer & Service... Pantip, 4th Floor on Right Side at end of Corridor... as you walk down it's dead in fromt of you.. Yellow sign. Can't miss it. Phone: 02-255-6773

They got a guy there.. name is BAS... speaks pretty good English... Tell him the Farang in the hat sent you... < The one with the beautiful Thai Wife :-) >

It was (is) a 250 GB drive.. cost 1,500 Bht to recover. Plus the cost of a New BIG UPS to prevent future accidents in my soon to be purchased Dream computer.

Hope this helps,

CS

[percy2]

Thanks for the suggestions.

My drive is really up the shute.

This will require removal of the platters I believe.

I'm not sure that that a shop in Panthip will have the clean enviro etc. to be able to do this.

Any body know of a companythat can deal with it?

Sorry for not adding the bit about platter removal previously.

Cheers

[simcity]

Thanks for the suggestions.

My drive is really up the shute.

This will require removal of the platters I believe.

I'm not sure that that a shop in Panthip will have the clean enviro etc. to be able to do this.

Any body know of a companythat can deal with it?

Sorry for not adding the bit about platter removal previously.

Cheers

Platter, please post what is happening, i am interested!

i need to get my brother's HD send to me in Australia.

the company he talk to in Europe told him need to change part and do the work in a ( white room ) chambre blanche...

but the price was going to be around 400 Euro...( and that for a 40g HD )

Please post the outcome

Edited February 25, 2008 by simcity

[TomBrown]

I had a Hard Disk Drive that failed some time ago, the fault was actually caused by the circuit board on the drive. Fortunately the computer store room had a faulty HDD of the same type and model but the circuit board was okay. An exchange of circuit boards done the trick and the drive was working again. Being cautious I copied the data to another drive as my new primary drive. I don't have the repaired HDD now, but as far as I know it still works, as I gave it to a friend for free who wanted it in his computer and I would have heard back if something went wrong.

How do you know for sure that the drive motor/spindle has seized. I'm guessing there's no whirring etc or other sounds you'd normally expect to hear?

By the way, I've never heard of that so called freezer trick, and in my opinion I don't think it's worth a try. To my surprise, a quick search on Google for 'hdd freezer trick' found several articles, but I have my doubts.

Good luck with the hdd recovery.

Tom.

[Gregory Morozov]

If it's really a motor seizure, in many cases clean room is not needed (but we have one). We might be able to help, maybe even under $150, depending on seizure. Feel free to contact us, we are in Phuket: +66-86-6827277, +66-76-383575 Phuket Data Wizards Co., Ltd.

Regards

Gregory

P.S.: I cannot really recommend the "freezer method". Yes, sometimes it works, but we already had a few cases when customers tried it, in the freezer the heads froze to the platters, and when the customer took it from the fridge and powered it on, the heads were simply torn off! Customers ended up paying much more for the head replacement, but the original problem was much simpler.

[BFD]

Sorry, quick question:

When these data are 'recovered', where do they go? Are they put onto DVDs, or do you have to purchase another hard drive that they load up with your stuff? I have a 320GB drive that's kicked the bucket and I wouldn't mind getting some of the data off of there.

Thanks,

BFD!

[percy2]

BFD,

IF its 300-320g I'm sure the sensible way would be to write it to a new HD.

Gregory I'll be in touch.

Cheers

[percy2]

Gregory,

Forgot to ask.

If Platter removal is required , do you have the ability to do it at your location?

Cheers

[Cuban]

P.S.: I cannot really recommend the "freezer method". Yes, sometimes it works, but we already had a few cases when...

I would agree that freezing is not the ideal first step attempt at a cure, especially if the data is valuble to you.

The onboard PCB can fail and is an easy first step cure but you seem focused on platter removal - is this based on spindle noise building up over time? I have "fixed" a few HDDs in the past that suffered such seizure with a gentle tap on the HDD's axle where the barings have stuck. However, in these cases the data was not very important to us and it was more a case of seeing if we could recover the data rather than needing to do so.

Now where did I put that backup?

[percy2]

P.S.: I cannot really recommend the "freezer method". Yes, sometimes it works, but we already had a few cases when...

I would agree that freezing is not the ideal first step attempt at a cure, especially if the data is valuble to you.

The onboard PCB can fail and is an easy first step cure but you seem focused on platter removal - is this based on spindle noise building up over time? I have "fixed" a few HDDs in the past that suffered such seizure with a gentle tap on the HDD's axle where the barings have stuck. However, in these cases the data was not very important to us and it was more a case of seeing if we could recover the data rather than needing to do so.

Now where did I put that backup?

I'm focused on platter removal because the spindle is physically seized. Tapping the axle has not helped.

I'm fairly sure that is what is required.

So what I'm looking for is a data recovery company that has on site (their site , not mine) capability to remove platters from a multi platter HD, unless there is another way to read the information from the platters without rotating them and keeping them on the said seized spindle.

Cheers

[Cuban]

....form the information you have given I agree you are on the right track. It's a bit like Schrodinger's Cat, to get the data you risk destroying it.

You don't happen to have tomorrow's winning lottery numbers on the disk?

[Gregory Morozov]

If Platter removal is required , do you have the ability to do it at your location?

Only for single-platter drives.

But I must repeat, for many bearing seizure cases it is not necessary. There are ways little bit more sophisticated than tapping and they require equipment. I would say we have something like 75% success rate on this failure on modern drives.

Besides, how do you know what you are actually have a bearing seizure? Sometimes people insist on "telephatic" diagnostics without sending the drive, I usually ask them to record a startup sound of the drive by putting a mic against top cover, maybe you can do that and send us an mp3?

Regards

Gregory

Edited March 9, 2008 by Gregory Morozov

[Gregory Morozov]

Just some examples:

Toshiba MK6025GAS seized bearing (MP3)

Don't remember what was the reason here - seizure or broken coil:

Maxtor 6L300S0 motor cannot start (MP3)

And this is NOT seizure:

IBM DJSA-220 (MP3)