Hard drive recovery recommendations

Tue Jul 17 18:23:37 PDT 2007

I have two hard drives (160GB SATA Hitachi Deskstars) that just failed on 
me.  They were pairs in a RAID1 set, and one failed 36 hours after the 
other.  Summary: There's nothing I can do other than pay thousands of 
dollars; can anyone suggest such a place? (-:

The symptoms are if you try to hot-add them, Linux eventually says:

[79893.436435] ata2: port failed to respond (30 secs, Status 0x80)

It seems to be giving link on the SATA bus, but it does not seem to be 
responding to requests for data.  They also cause the BIOS to hang on 
detection; the Promise card they came from simply won't proceed unless you 
unplug them, and the Dell Core 2 Duo I just tried times out and doesn't 
detect the disks.  (I've been trying them one at a time, but they have 
identical symptoms.)

So I figured I could experiment a little with the first one that died, 
because no matter what I tried I could send the other one to an expensive 
disk recovery place.  I froze the disk, to no avail; I waited three days, 
just in case it would work by magic, to no avail; finally, I just replaced 
the logic board from a replacement I bought from eBay, also to no avail! 
The second one that died I've kept in as pristine shape possible to 
maxmize the chance that a recovery vendor can restore data from it.

So now it's time to try expensive disk recovery places.  Unfortunately 
this is personal data, so I can't just expense account it.  Can anyone 
recommend a data recovery place or tell a personal story of how much a 
disk cost to recover, and how good the vendor seems to be?  I'm willing to 
pay thousands of dollars, but obviously if a $2000 place is as good as a 
$3000 place then I'd like to know that. (-:

Thanks a million!

-- Asheesh.

P.S. I've been saying to *others*, "RAID 1 is NOT backup!" for years, I 
just never actually followed my own advice well enough to do backup.  Now 
I'm backing up everything....