Semi-OT: Data Recovery?

From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk_at_yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Tue Aug 24 05:04:03 2004

On Mon, 2004-08-23 at 23:11, Ethan Dicks wrote:
> So here I am... doing backups of an 80GB Maxtor drive when it craps out in
> the _middle_ of the backup. :-(
>
> >From my digging around this morning, there appears to be a problem reading
> the reserved area that results in it being detected by the BIOS as a "Maxtor
> ROMULUS" (the class of drive).

For giggles you could try the old tricks of either warming the drive up
first then trying to access it, or it that doesn't work, then keeping it
cold (a pan of icy water sat on top of the drive works well, assuming
you don't spill any). I've brought drives back before now with
electronic faults using both approaches so that they'll run long enough
to get the data off.

Not going to help if it's corruption of the physical data on the
platters, of course, but maybe worth a try. Unless the drive's suffered
a head crash I can't imagine you'd make anything worse by trying.

> data recovery services, and who does a good job at a good price. I've already
> written to a company in N.Z. that has a base rate of under $300 NZ + recovery
> media (DVD-R, CD-R, blank drive...)

That does sound good; typically prices are about twice that over here -
not sure about the US.

cheers

Jules
Received on Tue Aug 24 2004 - 05:04:03 BST