Seagate Barracuda 7200.11

[GaidinTS]

I just got word back from the data recovery "professional" (http://www.krollontrack.com/) that I sent my drive to to see if anything could be recovered.
Here was their response:

In our diagnosis we looked at the drive physically, mechanically, and structurally. This diagnosis determined that your drive had a severe head crash. This head crash caused physical damage to the platters in your drive and has left the drive unrecoverable.
Hard drive failures can be caused by a number of different things; here is a list of the most common:
Power surge (blackout or brownout)
Moisture
Heat
Natural Disaster (fire, flood)
Improper care of equipment
Normal everyday use
Unfortunately we have no way to determine the exact cause of your failure.
Aside from the outcome, I hope you were happy with your service.

Before sending them the drive, I had tried replacing the PCB (using another company to clone the rom identifier for me), to no effect.

The drive is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA (S / N: 5QM27RR7), with a 500 GB ext4 partition. The drive clicks for a few seconds on startup, and is completely unavailable to the BIOS.

Is it worth approaching a different recovery specialist? Is there no possibility of recovering even a partial image of data on the drive? I know if I can get an image file, I could run something like Scalpel against it.

[labtech]

Depends on how valuable your data is. Recovery chances are low, if any. Additionally, some companies charge a previously opened fee just to do an evaluation on your drive.

[dmarques]

Hi,

Ask them if they could send you some pictures of the platters, just to check how severe is the head crash.

[labtech]

Good idea. Can even post pics here and likely will get some input.