J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Ken Blake
writes:
On Mon, 09 Oct 2017 23:19:30 -0500, wrote:


So, I've come to the conclusion it's hopeless trying to recover from
this drive. However, I am going to still see if a professional data
recovery service can do it.



In case you're not aware of it, such a service is *very* expensive. Be
prepared to pay well over $1000

Wasn't there a piece of software - it either ran under DOS or included
the OS, I think it was bootable in itself - that would repeatedly read
until it got something (possibly taking days to do a disc)? I think it
cost about 50 pounds. (I vaguely remember the name Spinrite, but that
might be something else entirely.)

I don't know if it works at all with modern (even as old as is being
considered here) discs that have remapping firmware.

GRC Spinrite ?

How to beat a disk to death, in one easy lesson.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinRite

The techniques described, I noticed these working in the lab
about 30 years ago. They cannot possibly be valid today.
Too much has changed.

Back in the old days, on SCSI or SASI disks, we had factory
and grown defect lists. And semi-automatic sparing. Now,
sector sparing is automatic. And I'm not aware of any way
to access a disk-level spares list (i.e. access the look-up
table that maps LBA to "real" sector number). And scrubbing
the disk 2000 times on one track, while in theory will
not damage anything, it really depends on whether there
was a debris field, and you're causing multiple head crashes
by driving the heads over the area.

Paul