Ditto on the DriveSavers. Here's a quick story... A long time ago (~6 years) I responded to an urgent page from a customer who owned a few video stores in the area (Springfield, VT). I arrived at the head store, introduced myself to the manager and then asked "Can you take me to your server?"
After 15 minutes of searching we found the server. In a storage room, in the back, completely buried with boxes of who knows what. The server was a 486DX2 running DOS 5 and Netware 3whatever. The storage drive, with all their records was dead. It would barley spin, and that's about all. When it would spin, it would scream like a banshee. I advised that the best course would be to ship the drive to drive savers for recovery. The owner agreed. I removed the drive from the server. As soon as I removed the drive I could tell that there was something not right with this drive. As I was moved the drive, I noticed some rattling and by rattling, I mean, there was things moving around in there, freely. Not sounds a drive, good or bad, should be making. I overnighted the drive to DriveSavers. In 1 week we had the data back on a DVD. Drive savers also sent back the damaged drive. Being the curious cat I am, I opened the drive up to find loads of fine black grit. The heads were swinging free across the platters, and the magnets were non-existent (the black grit, I'm assuming). The platters showed signs of the drive heads skimming back and forth, probably during shipping and in the parking area, a nice, silver band could be seen where the heads had worn through the surface of the platter. They recovered the data. 100%. I would have figured the drive (and data) was destined for the green monster (dumpster) with the damage I saw. DriveSavers can do some amazing work. <ali-g>Respeck</ali-g> ~k On Mon, 2008-11-17 at 15:12 -0500, Bill McGonigle wrote: > Alex Hewitt wrote: > > When I looked into having them recover a customer > > drive they wanted somewhere north of $3k but their price was > > proportional to the percentage of data recovered. > > I've used DriveSavers before and they do a good job. Their pricing is > sort of a nice qualifier - if $3K is too much to even consider for the > data, then a DIY approach is warranted. If $3K sounds like a bargain > not to lose that data, send the drive to them. > > -Bill > _______________________________________________ > gnhlug-discuss mailing list > gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org > http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/