Hi everyone. I've been a lurker here for a couple weeks because, like most noobs, I had a drive go bad. It's fixed now, so this is not a request for help. It was a bad RBBList on a WDC1200JB. Yes, I fully comprehend how unbelievably lucky I was that I was able to get it going and image it on my own. I had another drive here on a shelf that was exactly the same model and only off in the serial number by about 100. More unbelievable luck.

The only thing going for me was that I was bright enough to realize I shouldn't take a shotgun approach. It has to be more like a sniper, since you may only get one shot. (Anyone see "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"?) I was patient, read a ton, got pretty sure of a diagnosis, confirmed what was wrong, and tried the best solution I could find. Unlike many, I actually expected that there wouldn't be anything I could do going into this, and was pretty close to writing off the drive since the data just wasn't going to be worth the expense.

Mostly I want to say thanks to all the people on here who told me all the things I SHOULDN'T do. I actually write industrial automation software, and I'm only beginning to know what I don't know about hard drive internals. (Q: How many software developers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: None. It's a hardware problem.) Any time someone chimed in to say "There's no way in hell that that'll work," I took it to heart and kept looking.

Unlike most in the noob situation, I'm sticking around because I'm finding everything here REALLY fascinating. To me, it's amazing that hard drives manage to function at all given the precision involved. I mean, it's bad enough dealing with tiny CPU gates, but at least in those there isn't mechanical movement to contend with.

Here's something that I haven't seen in the sticky area that might be useful to some. I've seen some comments talking about how some people buy a couple manuals and a PC3000 and thing they're ready to fix stuff, end up destroying drives, and then punt to the real labs who then have to charge a bunch more due to the additional damage. I get that. Just because you can turn a bold doesn't make you a mechanic. But let's consider someone who honestly wants to get into the business and do it the right way. Someplace in here it might make a good collaborative document to describe on a high level what it takes. How to get educated, what sort of apprenticing to do, what inherent abilities will make someone successful (steady hands, good diagnostic skills, else...) or a failure, what's really awesome about being in the line of work and what sucks about it. Who knows it might steer a few the right way, and it would be one more thing to point DIY types to to see if they even have "the right stuff."
tl;dr: would it be useful to have a big post or two describing what sort of person/training regimen makes a good recovery/repair person?

I actually pondered getting trained and possibly learning to do this sort of thing briefly, but I don't think I'm serious enough to do it justice and it seems a bit too white knuckle stress puppy.

Hats off to all of you for doing it all the time though.

Oh yeah, this is funny:
Someone heard I got my drive working and handed be a 1TB WD My Book that hadn't worked for them for a year. One eyebrow went up as my brain said, "Are you kidding? I'm NOT a hardware expert..." Tried it, didn't work, found out it's encrypted by the board, but at least the drive would spin up and hddscan could scan sectors. I told them the best cheap thing to try would be to get a replacement usb pcb. Just as they were about to order, I noticed the part about the PCB runs on 12VDC. Something clicked and I ran back and looked at the adapter. Turns out they'd been using a 9VDC hardly any amp adapter from one of their kids toys, so the PCB LEDs lit and that's all. *Face palm* I happened to have a 12VDC that fit, it powered up, was recognized, and all data was recovered.
I'm getting too old for this...

Anyway, any time I need to check my HDD sanity, this will be my 1st stop from now on.