Disk recovery?

Tue Oct 29 07:44:27 PST 2002

On Tue, 29 Oct 2002, Heather Stern wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 28, 2002 at 09:54:14PM -0600, jhoney at flash.net wrote:
> > David Alban wrote:
> >
> > >
> > >   Does anybody here know a decent drive recovery place where they can do
> > >   a little discovery (first) and some recovery (possibly later) on
> > >   either or both of these drives?
> > >
> > >   Big TIA for any personal experiences :)
>
> > Fortunately I haven't had any experience with them but a few weeks ago I
> > sent a Seagate and a Western Digital drive back for warranty exchange.
> > One of the sites (I'm thinking Seagate) has a list of recommended
> > recovery services.  Drill into the path you'd take to return a drive or
> > RMA status.
> >
> > Good luck.
>
[snip]
>  Direct experience, then...
>
>  There is a known form of dd that will brutally make a few seek tricks to
>  try and beat its way past crudded out disk drive portions.  Look for it
>  on some of the "security and forensics" type linux mini-distros.
>
>  If a drive won't talk at all sometimes it's merely that the partition
>  table is screwed up that bad;  the data *may* be okay.  If track 0
>  isn't headcrashed, you can narrow down the correct sizes, one partition
>  at a time.  Slow, but rewarding, if hardware itself isn't what did you
>  in.
>
>  Once upon forever ago (about 93, 94) Jim and I both have done data
>  recovery ourselves;  trained by the best at Norton.  But that was
>  all software-style, no cleanroom excitement.  And neither of us have
>  rushed to learn about the gore under the hood of modern operating
>  systems.  Although, of course, it's pretty easy to have a well
>  behaved system at hand for comparison.   Still, verry ugggggly...
>
>  I'd saying if you can find the beginnings of things, you pretty much
>  win;  lost+found items, or CHKDSK.00N fragments, can be identified
>  using 'file' from a well-equipped rescue disk.
>
> Good luck.

Have you tried swapping the controler on the bottom of the drive with one
from a working drive of the same model?

Alot of times the controler is what goes bad.  If you don't care about the
warrenty (like it is already out of warrenty), then try popping the controler
board off and replacing it.  I have done this successfully on SCSI Seagate
drives.  (Usualy these are disks that don't show up in a SCSI bus scan or
stop responding after large reads.)

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