I would imagine in Croatia that is still quite a lot of money.

Everything is relative.

In UK this sort of job from us would equate to about $600

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PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

Yes. It was only the data extraction, the HDD is still unusable.
I had no extra costs except that amount, yes.

They are new guys, and they seam quite professional. If anyone wants I'm sure they would agree to receive HDDs from outside of Croatia, and upload the extracted data.

So, they told you that the preamp was bad (did you suggest this to them?), in which case they would have needed to replace the head stack. After replacing the head stack and recovering your data, they left you with a non-functioning drive. So, assuming that your replacement board is OK and compatible with your drive (is it?), this would suggest that they removed the new head stack and reinstalled your original one. Seems like a lot of extra work to me. I also find it surprising that they didn't charge you for parts, if parts were indeed required.

I suspect that there may not have been an internal fault at all, and that perhaps you may have misunderstood their diagnosis. Otherwise, if you can confirm that a head swap was performed for that price, then this company is likely to get business from all over Europe.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

With crap economy prices of DR need to come down. I'm seeing a good proliferation of under $500 cheap services, more and more. And that's a good thing.

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On a clear disk you can seek forever.

@fzabkar: I'm pretty sure it was some sort of internal failure, since I get no feedback in BIOS with identical electronics.

I am not sure which way they did the repair, but when I informed them about the problem I also gave them the link to this forum thread, so they are following the conversation. Now I will ask them to answer to you if it's not against their policy or whatever...

What if surface was fine, only needed to borrow an headstack from other drive and image the drive with an HW imager then put back still working heads to donor and bad heads to patient. This in fact was the price charged for extracting data nothing more nothing less as stated. So what ?

Moreover, such prices can be charged only on certain economies / countries or where labor cost, taxes AND shipping charges are LOW.

Croatia will become a member of the Eurozone in 2013. ISTM that this company has the potential to do very well when this happens. If they can confirm that they charge US$340 for a head swap, then I'll add them to my list.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Try using google translate for this page, it's a price list for failures:
http://www.datasector.hr/spasavanje-podataka

To recalculate croatian money (kn) in USD or EUR, write in google: 1999 HRK in USD, and you will get the result.

I'll ask them would they like to make a direct reply on this forum, so you get a direct connection.

Look it depends on the case. I have done several head swaps for 180 euros ( = less than $340). But I had tons of spare parts and a lot of time.
So?

PS. This thread has started to itch.

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SandForce SSD Recovery
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In my country, sty's case (if it was really head/internal problem of this model) should cost approx. 300 USD excl. VAT

But, I guess every case is unique, and can not be generalized.

Thanks, I've bookmarked it.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thank you all for this small commercial about our company. Finally we managed to get time and write something about this case.

Last week we received ST3250820AS and started our diagnostic. At first the drive was ''dead'' (not spinning at all) so we took standard procedure of replacing pcb which helped to spin up the drive. After that we realized the problem was not only with pcb but also with HDD heads. That took us to the next step of changing the heads stack in clean place (class 100).

After head swap drive was cloned successfully and all data was recovered. The next day original heads were restored in original drive and the donor heads were restored in donor drive so we did not have to charge anything for the parts.

The charge was 335 USD in total which is our standard charge for head swap.

Feel free to contact us with any problem or question. We will be glad to outsource are services and knowledge about professional data recovery services.

Best Regards

P.S. The english version of the site will be finished soon. Thank u Google Translator

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Ivan Jurić
DataSector - Data Recovery Services Croatia
http://www.datasector.hr