Anyone locally who recovers hard drives?

[Tunebug]

I had some water in the basement and lost a hard drive.  Does anyone know of any local places that do disk drive recovery?  I have found some places online, but I don't really want to ship the hard drive off and hope something happens.  I would feel better dealing with someone in person if I can....

[markd]

How much is the data worth to you?  Recovery usually starts at about $500 (usually more like $1k).  That being said, some departments at UWM have used:
http://www.gillware.com/

If you're semi computer savvy yourself, you probably just have a fried controller board on the drive.  If you get an *identical* drive, you can swap controllers and probably have a working drive again.  The data on the platters is still there.

[Tunebug]

I had found this place that cliams they will do it for $199, but I don't know about sending it cross-country:

http://www.nationwidedatarecovery.com/

I would be willing to pay a few hundred dollars, but not thousands.  I figure it is just the board...it just had a little water on the bottom.  Another drive right along side this one still works fine.  I thought about trying to swap it, but figured I would do more damage, and didn't know where to get a screwdriver to take out the screws...they have like a star pattern...not torx.

[markd]

I thought about trying to swap it, but figured I would do more damage, and didn't know where to get a screwdriver to take out the screws...they have like a star pattern...not torx.

Are you sure it isn't torx?  It is most likely a T8 or T9 if it has a "star pattern".  I've never seen any security screws on hard drives (though, for future reference, Harbor Freight has a very cheap set of security bits).  You can get small torx at a lot of places (mine are Craftsman but even Harbor Freight has cheap ones).  Bring the drive with you to check the screw if you're worried about buying something that won't work.

As far as doing more damage, if you're careful, this is unlikely.  Obviously you could drop it or something like that but simply taking off the controller card carefully isn't going to put you in any worse of a situation.  The data is on platters inside the case.

[Doug Mohr]

If it was submerged, DO NOT swap the controller board and fire it up. The drives all have pressure equalization vents that have a filter over them to keep dust out. The vent also lets water in and brings the dust with it. Then the residue dries on the platters and will scratch the surface when the heads come in contact with it and from that point on it will just click, click, click.

If a platter is scratched, traditional recovery methods (like swapping parts) is useless. It needs to have the platters read by expensive recovery equipment.

The first server drive I saw recovered was a 40 MB ESDI drive. 5.25" full height drive back in '92. It cost close to $20,000 to recover the data and it came back to us on 35 floppy disks

In my opinion (That and $4 will buy you a gallon of gas) your drive with water damage will be a minimum of $1,000 to recover any data from. I hope I'm wrong, but I just want you to be prepared.

[Tunebug]

Thanks for the replies.  It was not submerged...the bottom just came in contact with the water.  The data I lost is not worth thousands to me, so if that is the case, then I won't bother.  I am thinking about trying the board swap, since that won't cost much money.  I had just bought the disk a few months ago, so I should be able to get the same type, and I think it only cost about $40.  I would need to buy a new disk anyhow.  I suppose the only real downside is that perhaps I could wreck the new board by putting on the old drive and then I would have 2 bad disks...

[picopir8]

If you do try to recover the data yourself, the first thing you should do after replacing the board is to plug it in as a secondary drive in another computer and then image the drive.  I personally would get get a USB enclosure for the old drive.  That way if it did fry anything, it would fry the enclosure not the motherboard.

Even if water just touched the surface, it may have shorted out the circuit board, got water in the motor barrings, etc.   Odds our it will fail soon so the first thing to do is back it up.

I also recommend using a linux computer to do the recovery because you have more control over it.  For example, you could mount it as read only and then make your image.  Windows is a bit sloppier and tends to write hidden files everywhere and such a write could kill the drive or overwrite some data that windows thinks is invalid.

[Jack 1000]

Or if worst comes to worst and you have your recovery disks/back up data,  buy a second hard drive and with your backup/recovery disks, put your data back onto it.

Jack

[Dan the Man]

I recovered data from a hard drive that still turned, but was corrupt from who knows what and could not be restored using windows. I used a software package to get what I could off the disk by installing the bad disk in a funcioning computer. I was fairly sucessful and I got the important stuff I needed, but then again the drive did not have any physical damage . The program cost me around $100.

I did not have to open up the drive and get at the platter. That kind of recovery will cost you the big bucks already mentioned.

Good luck with it!

[sarusk]

What is the drive doing?

Is it spinning up?

Is it clicking?

You do not have to buy another driver to get a board, I've bought boards on eBay, just watch for subtle differences in them.

[Tunebug]

It's pretty much not doing anything...no spinning, clicking or anything as far as I can tell.  

I looked at the screws again and they were indeed torx...the holes were so shallow they just didn't look right.  So I bought a screwdriver and took off the board.  There was a sponge between the board and the rest of the drive that was still wet.  Many of the components were corroded and nasty looking.  I am sure the board is shot.  I ordered a new drive and hope that when it arrives, I can do the swap and it will work.

If it does, I will look on ebay for a second board so I can have two working drives....thanks for the tip.

[Mark Strube]

I actually have one that recently died on me as well, 500GB. There's some data important to me on there, most notably a lot of originals from my photography.

Right now it tries to spin up and then "beeps." I've done a little research and this seems to be something some drives do, although it's been debated that the "beep" might just be a type of clicking from the drive. It stopped working after I found the drive, which is in an enclosure, on the floor. Not sure how it fell.

Might I have any luck with the new controller board idea? Any other ideas for my type of situation?

[sarusk]

The drive itself is beeping? Or is something inside the enclosure beeping? Or something in the PC beepng?

Is there a pattern to the beeping?

[Mark Strube]

Pretty sure it's the drive since I've read reports of that happening (people have literally taken drives out of their computers to confirm that's where the chirp is coming from), as the enclosure has no audio capabilities as far as I know. It's just a single beep every 6 seconds or so... after a few minutes it just stops completely.

[Doug Mohr]

Pretty sure it's the drive since I've read reports of that happening (people have literally taken drives out of their computers to confirm that's where the chirp is coming from), as the enclosure has no audio capabilities as far as I know. It's just a single beep every 6 seconds or so... after a few minutes it just stops completely.

It apparantly fell from a desk based on your description. It sounds like the platters got scratched from the heads not being parked at the time of impact. Unfortunatly, changing controller boards or even moving the platters to a different hard drive will not help your situation.