BlackST,

you gave a really low quote for this type of work and you see what it has turned to? Now, he wants to do it himself.
Some people just want to find out how much it costs and will try to solve the problem on their own to collect that money from a customer. Also, those people are looking for a simple solution.

Most of the time you can tell by the first post if the person did some research on this site and needs to be guided in correct direction or simply wants one click solution. People come to get a free advise and I don't see anything wrong with that, but they will get mad with you, if you tell them that there is no easy answer to their problem or will decline to hold hands thru whole process.

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Luckily things can only get worse for them. There's a song of some years ago that fits... 'fu*k it' by Eamon... Simply this place is not comfortable for them.

Let's cut to the chase on this one: with surface scratches like this, the odds of successful recovery are slim. New heads will probably self-destruct in short order.

100% agree, but it has a chance.

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www.datarecoveryne.com

Normally yes, heads will suicide when reaching scratched surface. Normally. Of course there are solutions. Please forget this thread, mates. Start a new one instead.

I actually can understand the OP's frusteration.

I feel the same way like the guru's on this board when it comes to GSM (phones) related stuff. Sometimes I am reluctant to help because of secrecy and proprietary info. Why should I divulge hours of research, trials, errors, expenses, and provide a "free" solution? Of the posts that I've read so far, about 80% have responses from senior members that appear to have a superority complex, and I don't blame them. DR is very complex and very costly. The day that every joe could go buy a complete repair system and recover data on the fly would be the death of the industry (this of course will never happen considering how DR is like surgery).

On the other hand, everyone is a newb at some point in time. Why even bother having a discusion board about the topic when it is so secret? That is why it is so hard to find self help solutions for physical DR on the net.

My situation, I have a few harddrives that I need to pull very small packets of data from (a few MS Word files that are about 5-8 pages long). It's not very feasible for me to pay a few grand to recover this data... so here I am, combing the threads and humbly go about as a newb in this new (to me) community.

Hopefully you guys go easy lolz...

-JR

The forum's not here because anyone has to tell you things. The forum is here because (in my estimation) tech people like to talk to other tech people about tech stuff. Sometimes this includes instructions, sometimes it doesn't, but with 4 posts you have no right to demand anyone explain anything to you at all. I don't have that right either. The people who might have that right probably have the common courtesy not to do it in the first place.

_________________
You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

most of the pro will refuse to receive

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There is no substitute for education and experience
THANK YOU
SHAHI
shahi.mahbub@gmail.com

IMHO, Ontrack wouldn't be able to recover it.

Unfortunatley many PC enthusiasts, OCers and builders/repaires assume that since they can build, overclock a computer, set up raid, remove viruses, fix windows corruption, etc. That they somehow think that repairing a hard drive has got to be as simple. There was a time when I thought this, but learned quickly that hard drives are vastly more complex.

First mistake was by customer opening the drive at all. This is bad but because the person probably knows 0 about computers it is more acceptable.

A PC tech should know better then to open a drive in a non-clean room. Should have done research BEFORE opening, not the other way around. It doesn't matter if the customer had already opened it, opening it again just because the customer did only makes chances of recovery even worse then before =(


Anyways.


To the poster: Scratches, no matter the size,depth,etc are very bad. The closest relation I can think of right now to a head flying over even a small scratch like that is like driving a small car (honda or something) through a dip at like 60+ MPH. Yes, the car may make it through, but chances are it's going to be pretty messed up.

That along with the whole WD head alignment issue makes this basically impossible. The best case scenario would be that out of luck the top platter surface is the only one with damage, and someone can designate each head to read data on the good surfaces and get what data is available on the remaining surfaces. I would say the chance of getting ANY data off of the top platter is....1000000 to 1.