I need a head stack replacement on a 2TB Western Digital Caviar Black Drive (the 2010, sata2, 64MB cache variety) who blew both motor controller (smooth), and preamplifier.

I already have an identical drive manufactured on the same day/same location to act as donor. I also have intact adaptives from rom on U12, and am comfortable repairing/rebuilding the rom once I can access the SA.

Any recommendations for someone who would be affordable to a student and *extremely competent* at this would be greatly appreciated. I will likely be unable to graduate from my MSc without this data recovered.

Thanks,

-J

I suspect that you aren't getting many responses because most of us know that with these cases are never as simple as the client thinks. Here are my two options for you:

1. We assess the drive here at our lab and do the full recovery, just like any other. If your diagnosis is correct, the cost would be as $700 less a 20% academic discount with you supplying the parts and destination media.

2. We just assume your analysis is correct and simply swap the heads with the donor you supply and you are responsible to fix any firmware issues, clone the drive and recover the data. For that, I would be willing to do it for a custom price of $350 with no discount. As there may only be one chance to image the drive after the head change, we would not even power the drive on, so that you have the best chance.

We are quite busy here, so it would likely take a few days before we got it done.

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Luke
RAID Data Recovery

@thresh

That offer by Recovery Force is as good as I think you will ever get for such a recovery attempt. We typically have some of the best prices in the country but I don't think we would do this type of work for that price. If it were me, I would have them do the full recovery because they have the proper equipment to complete the recovery. If you have them just perform the head swap and PCB work, you could still end up with a drive that you can't recover yourself. There could be additional problems with the firmware etc...

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Totally agree, very reasonable pricing.

It's 90% certain you will run into other issues after the heads have been changed, this is why you've had no other offers.

It's opening a huge can of worms doing less than half the job and leaving the rest to an amateur with no tools, leaving whoever does the head swap open to complaints and bitching about "poor service". Just sayin'

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I could do full recovery for $350 if drive was not opened before. It could be even cheaper (about $200) if there is no problem with SA, nv-ram, a lot of errors or need more then one donor due to individual heads incompatibility.

I've never encountered NV-RAM issues with Western Digital drives before.

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Luke
RAID Data Recovery

I don't know how this type of price is even possible. I do head swaps for $650 + parts cost, and I still lose money on them half the time when you factor in the labor and equipment time consumed. Got three here now that I've been working on for two straight weeks each, and still have a ways to go before I'll have complete recoveries.

What Luke offered is a gift, wht drHDD says is just impossible pricing.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

He wrote - he has adaptives from rom. I had a lot of cases where client tried to do something with drive's stuff and somehow lost it, exchanged and etc.

WD drives doesn't have NV-RAM chips only ROM chips on PCB (or ROM embeded on MCU).

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Thanks CO.

As an engineer I find it annoying that terms such as ROM and NVRAM are used in the way that they are. When I got into electronics around 40 years ago, a ROM was a Read Only Memory and NVRAM was NonVolatile RAM. Just because Hitachi chooses to call their EEPROM chips "NVRAM" doesn't make them so, at least not to the exclusion of all other memory chips. As far as I'm concerned, one could legitimately refer to all nonvolatile memory chips as NVRAM. In fact the term is commonly used for BIOS chips in computer motherboards.

<end of rant>

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Well,
DrHDD Can Do This i can tell you that and at this rate his pricing is unbeatable .The NVRAM/Rom Nonesense Does Not Make Sense But In The end The Customer Wants The Data And DrHDD Will Deliver It

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Regards
Amarbir S Dhillon , Chandigarh Data Recovery Labs
Logical,Semi Physical And Physical Data Recovery
Website-> http://www.chandigarhdatarecovery.com