Hello,
I've got a drive that's failed which has data on it I would love to have back. I've had some quotes (from some of you on here) and to be frank, I just cannot afford the costs (£470+) The data isn't worth that much to me.
The drive is an old Hitachi HDT725025VLAT80 250GB IDE which is clicking, I (stupidly) opened it up and see a bit of dust on it, tried to remove said dust with a camera lens air pump and it spat more dust onto the platter
Now I reckon I could build a DIY laminar flow cab from parts I have lying about (high powered duct fans, kitchen grade stainless steel sheet) will need to buy a filter though.
I know I need a donor drive, head comb tools and possibly platter removal tools in order to decontaminate the hard drive and replace the heads. I would try buy used tools to reduce costs.
What I was wondering is if i could perform the head swap then could I send to someone with PC3000 to try recovering the data? Obviously at my own risk, if the drive won't work due to my work then we could leave it at that.
I would then sell all the equipment I have and hope to recoup as much investment as possible, or alternatively try and repair a few drives for friends to recoup my investment.
Basically I don't want to get into the business, but realise without something like PC3000/MRT Labs I'm very limited on what I can do. Does anyone offer a service where you can send drives to them to be used with DR hardware?
Try not to shoot me down too much if possible, I'm not trying to belittle how difficult/stressful this line of work can be. I'm just looking to reduce my costs by doing as much of the work as possible.