Was looking into recovering photos from a corrupted XP partition for a friend.

When I first powered the drive on the heads swept a couple of times while loading drive parameters into the BIOS. It loaded OK so then I was using dd_rescue and got to about 247MB on approx 160GB partition. To that point I had 4 errors, then the data rate dropped to a crawl and shortly afterwards the head stack started sweeping searching for data. I let it go for a min or so, then called it quits. A reboot and it loaded into BIOS with 0MB size. Tried rebooting a couple of times more with the same result, heads would sweep and I'd get 0MB drive capacity or drive failure, so I figured best left to the pros.

I've sent it to a place called CBL data recovery, will hopefully arrive tomorrow.

I've given them an outline of my suspicion of either a weak/dead/dying head 0 or a head crash, though I am making some bold assumptions with that, cost estimate I got back is between $1500 to $3500 AUS to replace the head stack.

How does this pricing compare to others. I came across these guys via the WDC website so didn't do a lot of research prior to shipping it to them.

The estimated for a head stack replacement seems on the high side to me, can anyone tell me if it's reasonable or not and maybe suggest someone else in Sydney.

It might turn out to be the controller board which should be a lot cheaper, I just wanted to know what the worst could cost

thanks

Glenn

BTW I've checked the board for any signs of obvious damage and there aren't any burnt IC's.

There is a difference between dd_rescue and ddrescue. It sounds you were using the former and it wasn't setup correctly. Your situation is unfortunate. I can guarantee you it's not your controller board.

Had a case like that with a Seagate, but the pattern was obvious in MHDD. Wound up replacing heads. ddrescue has the option to start at a different offset to skip problem areas. I do not comment on pricing.

It was a tricky one, when it wanted to run chkdisk booting into windows I aborted that, so no clue as to where problem areas were so I decided to go straight to making an image.

I was actually using ddrescue starting at the beginning of the partition. Not knowing how much data was on there to begin with I only wanted photos that hadn't been backed up.

They got the firm talking to from me about that habit.

The heads actually declined progressively while it was working and someone else before me had looked at the drive so maybe if an image had been made from the outset this could have been avoided. Not knowing the history of what had been done/attempted was difficult.

On the pricing, my main question wasn't so much about getting people to say too expensive, more that such an open ended costing from $1500 to $3500 I don't see as very good practice, given that they know the drive model and should know what's involved and therefore know quite accurately what it costs.

better pricing

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