Experienced Advice Requested Please. DIY Repair or Pay $$$$$

[mbrackliffe]

Hello All,

I am hoping for some advice regarding my hard drive recovery situation.

The HD in question is a 500GB Western Digital (i'll update the serial # when I have the drive in front of me)

Original symptoms:
- Drive would occasionally disappear from my system but return upon reboot.
- Accessing the drive started freezing my system until drive was no longer reliably accessible

Recovery attempts:
- Local repair shop attempted sector by sector clone with no success. Data transfer would start but stop with no communication possible until power cycled.
- Sent drive to Salvage Data for diagnosis and recovery quote. Their diagnosis is as follows:
* Heads need to be replaced
* Logical damage
* Repair process to replace head allow stable access to drive for forensic image to be created. Data recovery from
image. Recovery cost $1560.


My background - Aeronautical Engineer working in a company with class 1000 clean room and class 100 laminar flow benches. Limited knowledge pertaining to hard drive recovery but I am learning quickly due to dealing with all of this.

So, based on my access to a clean room and given the diagnosis provided by Salvage Data, do you think that replacing the heads myself and performing my own disk image and recovery is feasible? I have a new baby on the way any day now and I would very much like to recover my data without spending $1500. I have never attempted this sort of hard drive surgery so I lack the knowledge but I have plenty of technical ability and willingness to learn.

Thank you for your time and input.

[fzabkar]

See viewtopic.php?f=1&t=32501

[mbrackliffe]

Thank you for the link. I took a quick scan through the 4 pages and it looks very informative. II will spend some more time reading through it again along with the links that are provided.


My apologies I left out an important piece of the recovery attempts.

Prior to sending the drive out for diagnosis I attempted to run ddrescue in small increments using a USB enclosure and cycling the power when I lost communications. This worked for a little while until I could no longer get access for even small chunks of data. At this point I walked away from trying for a few days and when I next hooked up the drive my system did not recognize the drive letter and prompted me that the volume was not formatted. This is where I stopped and sent the drive in for DR because I was afraid it was deteriorating and I would lose the data permanently.

[fzabkar]

When you get your drive back, try to obtain a SMART report with a tool such as smartmontools or CrystalDiskInfo. This will tell us the physical state of the drive and will also confirm whether the drive can access its firmware area (SA) on the platters. If SA access is possible, then apply the "slow fix" as is the other thread, and run ddrescue again. Let's see the SMART data first, though.