Charlie,

I had a drive fail recently, and here is what I found out. Thanks to all 
the pluggers who helped me find this information!

1. Data Doctors and others - $1,000 and up; takes 5-10 days. Never tried 
them because of the cost. Dell recommended some other services, but they 
were in the same price range. Call Dell tech support if you need the 
names (I can't find them at the moment). Many of these have clean rooms 
where they can take out the disks and read the data directly from them.

2. Chuck House (Tucson) at 520 850-9492. Sounds very knowledgeable on 
the phone. Cost much less (a few hundred), but still the data was not 
that important. I would use his services if the data were critical. I 
think he could have recovered the data given that I probably have a hw 
problem as opposed to a dead MBR. No clean room, so one step down from 
the first group.

3. Red7 Computers - 480.755.GEEK. $59.00 per hour, diagnosis is free. 
Usually takes an hour to recover data if they can recover it. My drive 
died and was not recognized by the bios (i.e. hw issue - either bad 
board or corrupted sector -1) so they could not recover the data. Note: 
Linux recovery costs a little more, but they can do it. No clean room 
and no tampering with the hw so the drive needs to be recognized by the 
computer hardware.

If you have a hw problem and you really need to recover the data you can 
try to buy the exact same drive on ebay and swap out the board. Check 
out www.phantombidder.com for a simple way to win bids on ebay.

Good luck,

Mark

Charlie Bullen wrote:

> Hi, anyone know of a local service that can restore data from a 
> physically malfunctioning hard drive? The drive produces a loud 
> clicking. The drive will not boot and upon turning the computer on, I 
> get a message saying smart command failure.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Charlie
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