very old hard drive

[blinks]

I have a very old hard drive in a desktop PC that I would like to recover some files from. I took it to a back street computer shop and they fired up the machine and connected the old hard drive to a laptop. Nothing happened so they told me it was dead and there was nothing that could be done.

Is this the case?

[fzabkar]

That depends on what you mean by "nothing" and "very old".

If there was no sound or vibration, however slight, then that would suggest a board fault, in which case the solution would normally be cheap.

[pcimage]

As fzabkar says, their definition of "dead" might not be the same as ours.

To us "dead" is absolutely no sign of life when power is applied. No spinning, ticking, beeping, nothing!

Happy to take a look if you like? If it is PCB based then it won't be expensive.