Thanks for all the replies. If it would spin up I have Ontracks recovery tools that could get whatever data was there. I guess the freezer is worth a try, but I thought that was more for old school drives where the heads were not lining up with the tracks any more. For this drive, the failure to spin would have to be one of several things: Bad controller board that drives the motor (If I had an identical drive I could try swapping the board); bad motor; frozen motor bearings; or "Stiction" where the heads become stuck to the platters. I ran across a bad case of "stiction" long ago with an ST-225 (remember those?). On this drive you could actually try to spin the motor from outside the drive. I turned real hard with my fingers until the platters finally broke loose. When I powered it up after that I heard clunk clunk clunk clunk clunk.... I took the drive apart and one of the heads was still stuck to the platter and had ripped loose of the head arm. Good thing there was no valuable data on that drive.
-----Original Message----- From: Angus Scott-Fleming [mailto:angu...@geoapps.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 27, 2010 11:43 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Cheap recovery for dead HD? On 26 Jan 2010 at 14:26, Alverson, Tom (Xetron) wrote: > A friend has an external Seagate 1TB drive that died on them and it has > the only copy of a lot of the photos they took. I took the USB enclosure > apart and connected the SATA drive up directly to a PC, but the motor does > not spin at all (you can hear the heads move some at power up). She took it > to a local shop where they said it would cost $300 to recover the data, but > then changed that to $1000 when they found out it was a "large" drive > (1TB). > > Does anyone know of a good affordable place that will do this? Their > pictures are not worth $1000 at this point. Try the freezer trick, it worked for me once. Also, spinrite (grc.com, $89, 30-day moneyback guarantee if it doesn't help) can sometimes help IF the drive will spin up. Ontrack data recovery (google 'em) will give estimates by email. -- Angus Scott-Fleming GeoApps, Tucson, Arizona 1-520-290-5038 +-----------------------------------+ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
