Re: [OT] Recovering Data from HD

[Simon McCaughey <simonmcc@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 10:31:49 +0000, Ho Yin Ng <yahoogroups@xxxxxxx>
wrote:
>
> I was wondering what equipment do people at data recovery centres use
to
> recover data from dead hard disks?
>
> Is it something I can purchase and do at home?
>

It depends a lot on the cause of death.

If its purely software, ie formatted / boot sector problems then you
may be able to do it at home.

My father in law had a disk fail last year, with critical, non-backed
up information on it, and it was a more fundamental problem - the
drive wouldn't spin up at all.

In that case the specialist company will replace the controller card
(assuming they can get a similar one), and hope the drive will work

the next level is to do a platter transplant into another drive, thats
definitely not a DIY job (unless your pretty confident)

The specialist companies tend to keep a stock of drives for these
types of occasion.

In our case, they couldnt find an equivalent drive, and so we failed
to recover any data.

Hope that helps a little

Simon