On Mon, 23 Apr 2018 10:44:35 +1000, Peter Jason wrote:

On Sat, 21 Apr 2018 00:09:33 -0400, B00ze wrote:

Good day.

Got a 15 years old WD IDE hard drive, that was showing ZERO problems in
SMART data, suddenly can no longer calibrate (i.e. it can't read
anymore.) NOW the SMART data is showing something's wrong. Hard drive
"clicks" (heads go back and forth full disk) then quits trying. Have
another of the same model, but hesitant moving the platters myself;
apparently platters are not really "stuck" together and I could
mis-align them (rotate them in relation to each other) rendering the
whole thing un-readable. Was planning to move the data off but kept
delaying since it showed no sign of problems...

Now need a data recovery company; anyone have good experience with one
and can recommend?

I'm also curious about how they recover drives if not by using another
of the same model (where they hell how they going to find one as old as
mine, and can they really keep one of each model of ALL drives?) If you
can enlighten me on that too, would be great.

Thank you.
Best Regards,


I had such a damaged HDD a long time ago.

It was the attached HDD control card that was faulty.

I found another identical HDD and swapped over the control card using
a small star-screw driver.

This worked.

This might be the cheapest way out.

I had a drive that did spin but somehow the data got lost. Something
about the boot record. I could access some, but not all of tha data. I
plugged the drive into an IDE to USB adaptor. Booted up a different
computer using a Puppy Linux Flash drive. Then plugged that IDE hard
drive into the USB port. I was able to access a lot more of the data,
which I quickly copied to a 64gb flash drive (the Bad drive was only
40gb).

Aside from buying one of them IDE to USB adapters (under $10 on ebay),
you can download Puppy Linux for free. Thnn just have e small falsh
drive to make your Puppy boot and another flash drive big enough to copy
your data to.

Note: The bad drive was from a Windows 98 computer and had Fat32 format.
The computer I used to do the linux boot and transfer was a much newer
one, which would boot XP, Viata or Windows 7. (whether that matters).