I expect you are not going to have much luck.  The inside of a drive is
hermetically sealed in a clean room.  The head of a hard drive is cushioned
above the platter by the air flow created by the platter spinning.  A piece
of dust is several times thicker than the gap, and will cause you to have
another crash.

You are right about the expense - I had several drives recovered in my days
of network administrator.  Finally convinced everyone to save their data on
the server - which was backed up nightly.  Also used the threat (backed by
management) that if they had a disk crash, the company would not pay to have
it recovered since a secure location for saving data was available.

To me one of the best cost/performance tape drive around is the OnStream
units.  Never had a problem with the dozen or so I have used.

Watch word of the day - backups.

David V. Fansler
S/V Annabelle
DFansler@MindSpring.com
www.dv-fansler.com

 -----Original Message-----
From:   pic microcontroller discussion list [mailto:PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU]
On Behalf Of Richards, Justin P
Sent:   Monday, February 25, 2002 11:18 AM
To:     PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject:        [OT]: Hard Drive Crash Recovery

G'day Folks,

I have just had a 2 G hard drive crash. :(   Pulled it apart and found one
of the heads has well and truly crashed into the outer cylinders of one of
the disks.

I really would like the data back but cant afford the $ for the proper
people to have a go.  I am going to buy an identical drive and attempt a
platter change.

I heard some time ago that hard drives keep a table of good and bad sectors
so thought that my plan may fail due to this and perhaps for many other
reasons.

Anyone had a go at doing this sort of thing.

And yes, I do back up and as it turns out this is my backup disk but it
crashed while doing a reformat reload windows thing on my other drive and
did not get the chance to copy the important stuff back.

Would dearly love to get at all my old data.

Any help, experience would be warmly received :)

Justin

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