Re: OT hard drive problem

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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