Laptop HD repair/recovery question

Alex Hewitt hewitt_tech at comcast.net
Mon Nov 17 13:30:01 EST 2008


Ben Scott wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 10:38 AM, Ed lawson <elawson at grizzy.com> wrote:
>   
>> Running a live Linux CD results in a indication the HD is dead...
>> maybe hosed partition table.
>>     
>
>   Be warned that if the hardware is faulty, simply powering it up may
> be doing additional damage.  Unfortunately, making the determination
> as to "hardware vs software" is often itself difficult.
>
>   Depending on value of the data, you may want to just go right to a
> first tier data-recovery service.  These are the places that have a
> clean room to open the drive up, and equipment to read the data off
> the platters independent of the drive electronics.  On the down side,
> cost for a recovery will often be > $1000.  I've used CBL Data
> Recovery (http://www.cbltech.com/) in the past with good results.
> They offer a free quote, and you don't pay if they don't get data.
> Mail-in service.
>
>   Good luck!
>
> -- Ben
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>
>   
I'd echo what Ben just said. I have done recovery operations for 
customers and have gone as far as ordering an identical part number 
drive from eBay and then swapping the electronics (the drive was dead 
when I received it). The operation was a success but if the value of the 
contents of the drive are high enough you should just pack it up and 
send it to a recovery company. One such outfit, Drive Savers,  was 
featured on a CBS news program. See their web site at 
www.drivesavers.com. When I looked into having them recover a customer 
drive they wanted somewhere north of $3k but their price was 
proportional to the percentage of data recovered. I have also used 
Knoppix to mount a Windows NTFS partition and found that the Linux NTFS 
driver would allow me to access data that Windows would barf on.  Again 
though, if the data is really valuable don't bother with local places, 
just go to the folks that have the proper facilities to get the job done.

-Alex



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