Western Digital resurrection required please!

[Splatt]

Drive: Western Digital WD5000AAJS - 22YFAO 500gb
DCM: HBNNHT2MBB
Date: 13 Feb 2008
Product of Thailand

Board No: 2061-701444-600 AD XT 4Y11 1885 9 0002320 8 322

Hi All,
I'm wondering if anyone can help me with this drive. The story so far:
Drive failed after a power surge which my surge protector seemed to ignore. I'm guessing it was a surge after I also found a few blown capacitors on my graphics card. Now replaced.

Drive spins up and then down again after 10 seconds or so. Not recognised in CMOS, simply empty brackets.

I sent this to a DR specialist in the UK who initially quoted 250 for recovery, on receipt of the drive the quotation was increased to 500. The diagnosis was:

"The drive is suffering from a severe internal failure, the head stack assembly has 1 weak head, also there is a vast amount of bad sectors on the surface of the drive."

I agreed to the recovery because as well as my work files there are also family videos and photos that are irreplaceable.
The next correspondence I received included a list of recoverable files which amounted to 6% of the drive, for 500GBP.

When I telephoned the company they said they had recovered the files they thought I would want the most, namely my photographic folders which appear complete. This leads me to believe that the drive data was possibly accessible in raw form and that it was just a case of it being too time consuming to recover all the data.

I have now asked the company to archive the recovered files and return the drive.

I hope I don't sound too aggrieved when I say that I thought the fee of 500 for 6% of my data a little expensive, I just can't justify this expense at the moment. Times are hard. I was under the impression that around 90% of my data would be recoverable, and for this I would be willing to pay.

I have researched as much as I can and it seems that a platter swap isn't feasible and a board swap unlikely to work either. Although I have started looking for a matching donor drive.

Can anybody give me any advice as to how I may be able to recover my data? I'm willing to try anything.

Thanks in advance for any advice offered.

Steve.

[mr_spokk]

Hi, the fee vs % is not the way you should think.
As you got ALL that you asked for, your complete photo and videos you should be glad.
I have clients that pay more money for less data in %...If you have a database of 100-200mb on a 1Tb drive and it's difficult to retrive that info, the cost will increase in percentage.

Rgds
Bosse

[jono-ats]

I question the diagnosis that you received. Lots of bad sectors on this drive is unusual. A bad PCB will make it look like there are a lot of bad sectors. Get a second opinion.

[pclab]

If those files (6%) were not what you wanted, then you can stop the recovery process.
What are the files you wanted? Did you told them?
Why do you want the 90% of the disk? To recover the program folder??

[drc]

I'm guessing it was a surge after I also found a few blown capacitors on my graphics card.

This is not caused by a power surge, but is a defect in the capacitors that manifests over a long period of time

Drive spins up and then down again after 10 seconds or so. Not recognised in CMOS, simply empty brackets.

Does sound like bad heads. However if head-related procedures are performed successfully, there will typically be only a small amount of bad sectors (or none) unless the drive suffered some physical trauma

I sent this to a DR specialist in the UK who initially quoted 250 for recovery, on receipt of the drive the quotation was increased to 500.

500 GBP is cheap for heads on these (IMO)

The next correspondence I received included a list of recoverable files which amounted to 6% of the drive, for 500GBP.

This does seem odd.

I have researched as much as I can and it seems that a platter swap isn't feasible and a board swap unlikely to work either. Although I have started looking for a matching donor drive.

Can anybody give me any advice as to how I may be able to recover my data? I'm willing to try anything.

The best advice you can get is to stop thinking about trying any of this yourself. On a good day you might get lucky with an easy drive that has not already been tampered with, but this is neither of these. Look up "pcimage" on this forum and get a second opinion, he is located in the UK and comes highly recommended.

[lcoughey]

The price doesn't seem bad, though I'm surprised at the small amount of data that they can read. If you already accepted the quote, I don't think it is fair to change your mind now. However, a quote is just that, a quote. You could have turned it down and sent the drive to another lab for a second opinion.

My guess is that the data recovery specialist you are using might not have the ability to deal with hardware issues and unable to replace the PCB and/or heads. If you do send the drive to another lab, don't be surprised if they quote more, if they do have to change the heads.

[Splatt]

Thanks for the responses so far, it seems like a second opinion may well be in order.

To address a couple of the points raised:

As you got ALL that you asked for, your complete photo and videos you should be glad.

I didn't get all that I asked for, I got what they thought I would want. None of the videos have been recovered as they were on the desktop and not obvious. The 'My pictures' folder was successfully recovered.

If those files (6%) were not what you wanted, then you can stop the recovery process.
What are the files you wanted? Did you told them?
Why do you want the 90% of the disk? To recover the program folder??

They returned the drive after their analysis. As part of their contract they send out a browsable map of the files recovered, if you wish to proceed you then pay and the data is shipped. The data is now in their archive.
I wanted as much data back as possible. Maybe naively I thought that the process was fix drive then copy all available data. Obviously program files are replaceable. I am a graphic designer and musician, you wouldn't believe the amount of stuff on there.

Look up "pcimage" on this forum and get a second opinion, he is located in the UK and comes highly recommended.

This will be my next step I think! Thanks.

I'm surprised at the small amount of data that they can read

Me too. What I think may be even more telling is that in the directory tree of recovered files the recovered subfolder names tend to be at the beginning of the alphabet.

If you already accepted the quote, I don't think it is fair to change your mind now.

As I said above, I haven't broken any contract. They sent me the list for approval, if I accepted then I would have been liable and would have paid. I don't mess people around. I just felt that the 6% recoverable didn't justify the expense.

Thanks again for all your insights. It's Murphy's law that I recently bought an external drive to back everything up to. The week I stop playing the lottery I'll be sure to tell you all my numbers!

Steve.