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#46
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Recommend data recovery company?
B00ze wrote:
J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote: Rather than move the platters, why not move the controller (from the good drive to the dud), if you think that's what's faulty? Doing that might also be possible without breaking the seal on the housings. Yeah, I will try that first if I decide the recovery labs practice extortion. Considering their costs, $1500 is cheap. It's not cheap when it is a one-time cost out of your personal pocket. You could probably replace your car's exhaust pipes for a hell of a lot cheaper than going to a muffler shop but then it is irrelevant that your labor, materials, and gear is cheaper to you because you can't do the job and have to pay someone else. Just like you, they want a reasonable salary, too, and they are in business to stay in business. There's the cost of the personell. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/d...RCH_KO0,22.htm The highly specialized lab equipment is very expensive. There's the cost to train them on the lab equipment (unless they manage to hire someone away from a competitor with the exactly the same gear). There's the cost to setup, run, and continually maintain a clean room even when there's no work being done. There's also the salaries of all the other employees. The typical recovery time runs 2 to 5 days (16 to 40 hours) in trying to recover as much data as possible off your failed drive. What do you earn per hour? And it's not just a tech's salary but all the operating costs of a company that get rolled into factoring the price of sales. Also, while they may quote a price, they have to be exorbitant and vague over the phone because they don't yet know how much time and resources they will have to invest in recovering your data. Could be cheaper. Could be more expensive. If they had millions of customers like McDonalds then they could spread their costs over all those customers. A hundred customers over which all those much higher salaries and much more expensive operating costs are spread will not be so blessed with the economy of volume sales. I don't how many sales might be typical in a year for drive recovery services; however, I strongly suspect it is a hell of alot less than the 75 burgers per *SECOND* that McDonalds sells while using simpleton equipment with minimum-wage employees instead of the very pricey specialized lab gear along with employees that make 4-5 times, or much more, per hour than that of a McDonalds employee. You want someone with the expertise of a McDonalds employee using their toolbox gear to recover your data? |
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#47
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Recommend data recovery company?
As an aside to your failed drive issue, perhaps you might want to
consider running drive health monitors on your other computers. I use HDD Sentinel but there are other choices. Some drives include Calibration Retry Count (attribute 0B hex or 11 decimal) in their SMART data. It measures the number of retries to calibrate a drive which can indicate problems with the motor, bearings, or power supply of the drive. My Western Digital drive do but no my Seagate drive (and it's not relevant to the SSD drive). Apparently this attribute is not rated as critical to the health of the disk. Usually the Current Pending [Reallocation] Sector Count (number of unstable sectors waiting to get remapped and copied to reserve sectors) is more critical in measuring a drive's health. In HDD Sentinel, both attributes are enabled (included) to affect its measure of a drive's health but I don't know the weighting they give to each. Here's the list of SMART attributes that HDD Sentinel will monitor: https://www.hdsentinel.com/smart/smartattr.php SMART really isn't that smart. A drive with an A-rating regarding its health could immediately fail. A drive with an F-rating could continue running for years. SMART is just trying to report some behaviors of the drive and extrapolate might they might indicate. SMART is failure prediction, not proof of imminent failure. A SMART health monitor might say "green" but the drive still fails. However, if the monitor says "red" then it's time to do backups (which should be regularly scheduled for other than just hardware failure), move data, or clone the drive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.#Accuracy |
#48
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Recommend data recovery company?
On 2018-04-28 05:40, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
[snip] The drive still spins and shows-up in Windows, so it's not a power-delivery problem. I can swap the ROM chip, provided I am very very patient with this (I don't have an air gun, so I'd be stuck with a soldering iron.) If there was no possibility of a failed head then I'd swap the boards right away... I'd say it's probably worth - if you're considering this route - getting the hot-air gun. My last 6 months' employment (with a company which repaired car electronics; I was mostly on dashboards [the bit behind the dials - it's a lot of the computing in modern cars]) involved a lot of replacement of surface-mount devices; the devices (packages) themselves are surprisingly robust, it's the tracks - and especially pads - on the board that tend to lift. Especially where it's a pad connected to a track that only goes under the device. Yeah, Vanguard says the same thing lol. Guess I'll go get one if I decide to try to swap PCBs. Still gotta examine the drive's PCB to see if there is something that's obviously burnt. But I want to call some places first, see how cheap a quote I can get, see if I can get them to play nice - i.e. I provide both drives, you swap the heads and the PCB and ship it back, so how cheap can you make it? Since the OP is asking about using a recovery lab on his failed drive, I doubt he has the skills and gear to swap the ROM chip assuming he finds a donor drive with EXACTLY the same PCB (same minicontroller, same firmware) and even knows how to identify which is the ROM chip to move. I have another drive of the same make and model, bought at the same time. Identifying the chip might be a problem if there's a bunch of similar chips on the board - the days where I could just look-up a chip number in TTL books to see what it does are long gone. Yes, even reading the part number may require optical aid - and it's highly likely to be a proprietary one anyway, though if you ask (e. g. here) there's likely to be someone who recognises part of the number. [] Yup, I'll need a magnifying glass (besides, nowadays I need one anyway lol). Hopefully it's readable... Well, I won't get nowhere if the problem is a failed head; then I'd I wonder if a failed head could fail in such a way that it damages the electronics to which it connects. I suspect open-circuit is more likely than a short, but I don't actually know what the head technology _is_ these days (my mind still visualises some sort of coil - while the technology still involves magnetism, it can't be _too_ far from that). Yeah, well, if the failed head has started magnetizing everywhere it goes, then it's too late now ;-) If it's burnt something on the PCB, then it will burn it right away again on the replacement PCB. I should really replace both the head stack and the PCB (then I would not need to mock around with the calibration chip.) But I've never done that before; chances are high I can screw something up... have to swap the head assembly and put the ROM chip back. It's all kinda risky, those heads are very fragile, which is why I'm looking for a cheap recovery place. But there's no way I'm paying $2000 just to get old game ISOs and old documents - that drive has been in my old Is that what's there? For game ISOs, presumably you could find copies of the game CDs on ebay? The documents obviously not. If you hadn't accessed it for 5 years, do you actually need it anyway? I can see myself still wanting to access it for completeness (and crossness with myself for not having backed it up), but ... Yup, haven't touched the stuff in years. I can live without it, but it has all my saved games (from games I'll never play again lol) and I don't know what documents (coz I haven't used it in so long.) It's mostly for completeness that I want it back. Best Regards, -- ! _\|/_ Sylvain / ! (o o) Memberavid-Suzuki-Fdn/EFF/Red+Cross/SPCA/Planetary-Society oO-( )-Oo Gravity is a myth The earth sucks. |
#49
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Recommend data recovery company?
On 2018-04-28 14:56, VanguardLH wrote:
B00ze wrote: J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote: Rather than move the platters, why not move the controller (from the good drive to the dud), if you think that's what's faulty? Doing that might also be possible without breaking the seal on the housings. Yeah, I will try that first if I decide the recovery labs practice extortion. Considering their costs, $1500 is cheap. It's not cheap when it is a one-time cost out of your personal pocket. You could probably replace your car's exhaust pipes for a hell of a lot cheaper than going to a muffler shop but then it is irrelevant that your labor, materials, and gear is cheaper to you because you can't do the job and have to pay someone else. Just like you, they want a reasonable salary, too, and they are in business to stay in business. Considering that swapping heads/PCB (or moving the platters to a new drive) is a one hour job, $1500 is a crazy per-hour salary. And charging more for bigger drives is nonsense - fixing physical damage takes the same amount of time no matter how much data's on the drive. I need a place that's flexible, where I can negotiate how much work gets done before we call it quits. I don't want them spending 3 days trying to rebuild a failed NTFS filesystem; I don't want to pay for that... The highly specialized lab equipment is very expensive. There's the cost to train them on the lab equipment (unless they manage to hire someone away from a competitor with the exactly the same gear). There's the cost to setup, run, and continually maintain a clean room even when there's no work being done. There's also the salaries of all the other employees. I think $500 for a one hour job is quite reasonable despite the expenses. If they can call me after that and tell me if it will take more, then I'm good, I can stop it there... The typical recovery time runs 2 to 5 days (16 to 40 hours) in trying to recover as much data as possible off your failed drive. What do you earn per hour? And it's not just a tech's salary but all the operating costs of a company that get rolled into factoring the price of sales. Also, while they may quote a price, they have to be exorbitant and vague over the phone because they don't yet know how much time and resources they will have to invest in recovering your data. Could be cheaper. Could be more expensive. That's why I'm not really interested in places that say it'll cost "$2000 or nothing" if they cannot do it - I don't want them spending 40 hours on this, all I need is an engineer that's swapped parts between drives before. If it takes more than that, I'll just chuck the drive in the trash... If they had millions of customers like McDonalds then they could spread their costs over all those customers. A hundred customers over which all those much higher salaries and much more expensive operating costs are spread will not be so blessed with the economy of volume sales. I don't how many sales might be typical in a year for drive recovery services; however, I strongly suspect it is a hell of alot less than the 75 burgers per *SECOND* that McDonalds sells while using simpleton equipment with minimum-wage employees instead of the very pricey specialized lab gear along with employees that make 4-5 times, or much more, per hour than that of a McDonalds employee. You want someone with the expertise of a McDonalds employee using their toolbox gear to recover your data? Yeah, there is that fact that they don't do that many recoveries a year... Regards, -- ! _\|/_ Sylvain / ! (o o) Memberavid-Suzuki-Fdn/EFF/Red+Cross/SPCA/Planetary-Society oO-( )-Oo Money is the root of all evil, and man needs roots. |
#50
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Recommend data recovery company?
In message , B00ze
writes: On 2018-04-28 05:40, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote: [] I'd say it's probably worth - if you're considering this route - getting the hot-air gun. My last 6 months' employment (with a company which [] Yeah, Vanguard says the same thing lol. Guess I'll go get one if I [] Well, I won't get nowhere if the problem is a failed head; then I'd I wonder if a failed head could fail in such a way that it damages the electronics to which it connects. I suspect open-circuit is more likely than a short, but I don't actually know what the head technology _is_ these days (my mind still visualises some sort of coil - while the technology still involves magnetism, it can't be _too_ far from that). Yeah, well, if the failed head has started magnetizing everywhere it goes, then it's too late now ;-) If it's burnt something on the PCB, then it will burn it right away again on the replacement PCB. I should really replace both the head stack and the PCB (then I would not need to mock around with the calibration chip.) But I've never done that before; chances are high I can screw something up... Well, not calibration, but you'd still need whichever chip holds the list of bad sectors and which ones have been swapped in their place. [] for a cheap recovery place. But there's no way I'm paying $2000 just to get old game ISOs and old documents - that drive has been in my old Is that what's there? For game ISOs, presumably you could find copies of the game CDs on ebay? The documents obviously not. If you hadn't accessed it for 5 years, do you actually need it anyway? I can see myself still wanting to access it for completeness (and crossness with myself for not having backed it up), but ... Yup, haven't touched the stuff in years. I can live without it, but it has all my saved games (from games I'll never play again lol) and I don't know what documents (coz I haven't used it in so long.) It's mostly for completeness that I want it back. We are alike. I paid 60 pounds for another netbook of the same model as my XP one that died (it overheats within a few seconds of power on, and shuts itself off), just so I can put the HD in and "see what's there" (OS and software wise, and settings; the _data_ I read off it no problem); it (the replacement netbook) is still sitting here as delivered, I haven't opened the package! Best Regards, -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf "Does Barbie come with Ken?" "Barbie comes with G.I. Joe. She fakes it with Ken." - anonymous |
#51
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Recommend data recovery company?
In article , B00ze
wrote: Rather than move the platters, why not move the controller (from the good drive to the dud), if you think that's what's faulty? Doing that might also be possible without breaking the seal on the housings. Yeah, I will try that first if I decide the recovery labs practice extortion. Considering their costs, $1500 is cheap. It's not cheap when it is a one-time cost out of your personal pocket. You could probably replace your car's exhaust pipes for a hell of a lot cheaper than going to a muffler shop but then it is irrelevant that your labor, materials, and gear is cheaper to you because you can't do the job and have to pay someone else. Just like you, they want a reasonable salary, too, and they are in business to stay in business. Considering that swapping heads/PCB (or moving the platters to a new drive) is a one hour job, $1500 is a crazy per-hour salary. you're paying for their expertise and skill, not an hourly rate. they also have the proper equipment to use, including a clean room, which isn't cheap. you're also assuming it only takes an hour to recover a drive. recovery is nowhere near as easy as you think. And charging more for bigger drives is nonsense - fixing physical damage takes the same amount of time no matter how much data's on the drive. false. I need a place that's flexible, where I can negotiate how much work gets done before we call it quits. I don't want them spending 3 days trying to rebuild a failed NTFS filesystem; I don't want to pay for that... do you want your data recovered or not? simple yes or no question. The typical recovery time runs 2 to 5 days (16 to 40 hours) in trying to recover as much data as possible off your failed drive. What do you earn per hour? And it's not just a tech's salary but all the operating costs of a company that get rolled into factoring the price of sales. Also, while they may quote a price, they have to be exorbitant and vague over the phone because they don't yet know how much time and resources they will have to invest in recovering your data. Could be cheaper. Could be more expensive. That's why I'm not really interested in places that say it'll cost "$2000 or nothing" if they cannot do it - if they can't do it, there is no cost. I don't want them spending 40 hours on this, all I need is an engineer that's swapped parts between drives before. If it takes more than that, I'll just chuck the drive in the trash... toss it. it's clear that the data on it is not worth much to you. |
#52
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Recommend data recovery company?
B00ze wrote:
Considering that swapping heads/PCB (or moving the platters to a new drive) is a one hour job, $1500 is a crazy per-hour salary. Did you ask them if they charge a fixed fee regardless of what they end up repairing? I doubt it. If a simple PCB swab (along with moving over the ROM chip or microcontroller if the ROM is inside there) would take a lot less time and be a lower price. What they quote over the phone is going to be exhorbitant because they don't yet know what they have to do. Once you ship the drive to them, they can provide a much more accurate estimate and then you can decide if you want to go ahead or have them ship the drive back to you. How would they know how much work it would take until they see it? Do you expect an over-the-phone estimate of repairing your car's exhaust based on "it makes more noise" from the muffler shop? They probably won't even give you an estimate. They must see first. A PCB (and chip swap) doesn't require a clean room nor highly specialist techs working with ferromagnetic microscopes or other specialized and other pricey equipment. And charging more for bigger drives is nonsense - fixing physical damage takes the same amount of time no matter how much data's on the drive. Okay, you'll have to explain to me why trying to read through 10 GB of sectors on a platter takes the same amount of time as trying to use a ferromagneticscope on 1 TB of sectors. Ever format a driver? Yup, you have, so you know it takes a lot longer to format a 10 GB drive than for a 1 TB drive. I need a place that's flexible, where I can negotiate how much work gets done before we call it quits. I don't want them spending 3 days trying to rebuild a failed NTFS filesystem; I don't want to pay for that... Once they get the drive and can do an inspection, they should be able to provide a more accurate estimate. The typical recovery time runs 2 to 5 days (16 to 40 hours) in trying to recover as much data as possible off your failed drive. What do you earn per hour? And it's not just a tech's salary but all the operating costs of a company that get rolled into factoring the price of sales. Also, while they may quote a price, they have to be exorbitant and vague over the phone because they don't yet know how much time and resources they will have to invest in recovering your data. Could be cheaper. Could be more expensive. That's why I'm not really interested in places that say it'll cost "$2000 or nothing" if they cannot do it - I don't want them spending 40 hours on this, all I need is an engineer that's swapped parts between drives before. If it takes more than that, I'll just chuck the drive in the trash... Hmm, I don't remember calling a drive recovery service that said they charged a minimum fee of $2000 (or quoted a minimum fee). Maybe I was blessed in who I called (sorry, been too many years to remember who it was plus it was for someone else's failed drive). Have you called any of the recovery companies mentioned so far to see how they quote estimates of unseen devices? Pick one that sounds most fair, check they pay for return shipping, and the worst you're out is the cost to ship the drive to them if upon inspection they quote a price that is extreme compared to the value of the data on the drive (which doesn't sound of much value from your descriptions). |
#53
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Recommend data recovery company?
On 2018-04-30 07:33, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
[snip] Yeah, well, if the failed head has started magnetizing everywhere it goes, then it's too late now ;-) If it's burnt something on the PCB, then it will burn it right away again on the replacement PCB. I should really replace both the head stack and the PCB (then I would not need to mock around with the calibration chip.) But I've never done that before; chances are high I can screw something up... Well, not calibration, but you'd still need whichever chip holds the list of bad sectors and which ones have been swapped in their place. Ahhh, yes, now that's annoying; if calibration and bad sectors go into the same chip I'm kinda stuck. But I guess it's OK, I can loose some files, I just want the bulk of them... for a cheap recovery place. But there's no way I'm paying $2000 just to get old game ISOs and old documents - that drive has been in my old Is that what's there? For game ISOs, presumably you could find copies of the game CDs on ebay? The documents obviously not. If you hadn't accessed it for 5 years, do you actually need it anyway? I can see myself still wanting to access it for completeness (and crossness with myself for not having backed it up), but ... Yup, haven't touched the stuff in years. I can live without it, but it has all my saved games (from games I'll never play again lol) and I don't know what documents (coz I haven't used it in so long.) It's mostly for completeness that I want it back. We are alike. I paid 60 pounds for another netbook of the same model as my XP one that died (it overheats within a few seconds of power on, and shuts itself off), just so I can put the HD in and "see what's there" (OS and software wise, and settings; the _data_ I read off it no problem); it (the replacement netbook) is still sitting here as delivered, I haven't opened the package! I once bought a C64 (I had sold mine years before) just so I'd have one in case I wanted to hook it up. I carried the thing from apartment to apartment, never opening it. Got rid of it one day never having opened the box lol. For the hard drive, I do not need it for program settings, because it was a DATA drive only in that system. I can still boot the old PC and look at how programs are configured, as I ever so slowly migrate everything to my new PC, since all the programs and registry are on different drives. I should really hurry up with that tho, another drive is bound to stop working soon... Regards, -- ! _\|/_ Sylvain / ! (o o) Memberavid-Suzuki-Fdn/EFF/Red+Cross/SPCA/Planetary-Society oO-( )-Oo Is there another word for synonym? |
#54
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In message , B00ze
writes: On 2018-04-30 07:33, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote: [] Well, not calibration, but you'd still need whichever chip holds the list of bad sectors and which ones have been swapped in their place. Ahhh, yes, now that's annoying; if calibration and bad sectors go into the same chip I'm kinda stuck. But I guess it's OK, I can loose some files, I just want the bulk of them... [] Unless some of the swapped sectors - either in the dead drive or the one whose boards you use - are ones that cover the partition table, master file table, boot sectors, etcetera. -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf I love the way Microsoft follows standards. In much the same manner that fish follow migrating caribou. - Paul Tomblin, cited by "The Real Bev", 2017-2-18. |
#55
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Recommend data recovery company?
On 2018-04-30 11:10, VanguardLH wrote:
B00ze wrote: Considering that swapping heads/PCB (or moving the platters to a new drive) is a one hour job, $1500 is a crazy per-hour salary. Did you ask them if they charge a fixed fee regardless of what they end up repairing? I doubt it. If a simple PCB swab (along with moving over the ROM chip or microcontroller if the ROM is inside there) would take a lot less time and be a lower price. What they quote over the phone is going to be exhorbitant because they don't yet know what they have to do. Once you ship the drive to them, they can provide a much more accurate estimate and then you can decide if you want to go ahead or have them ship the drive back to you. I'm sorry I haven't called any of them yet, I spend all my time here discussing what will happen when I DO call lol. I will do so soon, I'll report back here. How would they know how much work it would take until they see it? Do you expect an over-the-phone estimate of repairing your car's exhaust based on "it makes more noise" from the muffler shop? They probably won't even give you an estimate. They must see first. A PCB (and chip swap) doesn't require a clean room nor highly specialist techs working with ferromagnetic microscopes or other specialized and other pricey equipment. And charging more for bigger drives is nonsense - fixing physical damage takes the same amount of time no matter how much data's on the drive. Okay, you'll have to explain to me why trying to read through 10 GB of sectors on a platter takes the same amount of time as trying to use a ferromagneticscope on 1 TB of sectors. Ever format a driver? Yup, you have, so you know it takes a lot longer to format a 10 GB drive than for a 1 TB drive. I'm assuming the platters are intact. From what I can tell from our discussions, they are like TV repairmen - they quote you a price that depends on how big the TV is, regardless of the fact that it matters not one bit how big the TV is. OF course if they have to rebuild everything because the platters are damaged it will take longer the more data you have... I need a place that's flexible, where I can negotiate how much work gets done before we call it quits. I don't want them spending 3 days trying to rebuild a failed NTFS filesystem; I don't want to pay for that... Once they get the drive and can do an inspection, they should be able to provide a more accurate estimate. The typical recovery time runs 2 to 5 days (16 to 40 hours) in trying to recover as much data as possible off your failed drive. What do you earn per hour? And it's not just a tech's salary but all the operating costs of a company that get rolled into factoring the price of sales. Also, while they may quote a price, they have to be exorbitant and vague over the phone because they don't yet know how much time and resources they will have to invest in recovering your data. Could be cheaper. Could be more expensive. That's why I'm not really interested in places that say it'll cost "$2000 or nothing" if they cannot do it - I don't want them spending 40 hours on this, all I need is an engineer that's swapped parts between drives before. If it takes more than that, I'll just chuck the drive in the trash... Hmm, I don't remember calling a drive recovery service that said they charged a minimum fee of $2000 (or quoted a minimum fee). Maybe I was blessed in who I called (sorry, been too many years to remember who it was plus it was for someone else's failed drive). Yeah, I'll just have to call places and discuss. Have you called any of the recovery companies mentioned so far to see how they quote estimates of unseen devices? Pick one that sounds most fair, check they pay for return shipping, and the worst you're out is the cost to ship the drive to them if upon inspection they quote a price that is extreme compared to the value of the data on the drive (which doesn't sound of much value from your descriptions). Most of the ones people suggested operate in the United States. I found a few right here in my city. I shall have to call all of them, United Stated And Canada, to see who is the most flexible and fair on price. It's hard to judge right? They ALL say the same things: We're the best, if we cannot do it no one can, we have the best clean room, we have the best tools, etc... Regards, -- ! _\|/_ Sylvain / ! (o o) Memberavid-Suzuki-Fdn/EFF/Red+Cross/SPCA/Planetary-Society oO-( )-Oo I don't kill my enemies: I slime them! -Odo |
#56
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Recommend data recovery company?
B00ze wrote:
On 2018-04-30 07:33, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote: [snip] Yeah, well, if the failed head has started magnetizing everywhere it goes, then it's too late now ;-) If it's burnt something on the PCB, then it will burn it right away again on the replacement PCB. I should really replace both the head stack and the PCB (then I would not need to mock around with the calibration chip.) But I've never done that before; chances are high I can screw something up... Well, not calibration, but you'd still need whichever chip holds the list of bad sectors and which ones have been swapped in their place. Ahhh, yes, now that's annoying; if calibration and bad sectors go into the same chip I'm kinda stuck. But I guess it's OK, I can loose some files, I just want the bulk of them... The PCB I looked at, the outboard chip had too small of a capacity to hold a spare sector table. One IBM drive, it was claimed it was using 1MB of cache RAM to hold the spares table for that drive. The little 8 pin chip I looked at, was only 64KB of storage. Whatever is in there, is smaller. Maybe it's an add-on code module. They could have gone smaller, to a 2KB config EEPROM if they wanted, and save some money. That suggests 64KB was selected for a reason, and there's actually close to 64KB of stuff in it. They wouldn't buy a 64KB chip, if a 2KB chip could identify the number of platters and the capacity. The service area on the platter, is normally where bulk information is stored. You'd only resort to an external chip, if the main chip needed to be "patched" to be able to finish the access routine to get to the SA. Maybe you could store the entire bootstrap in the 64KB chip, and not bother with a level 1 metal ROM inside the controller SOC. But then, they wouldn't need that nine digit part number on the controller, if it wasn't "custom". The main chip would have a shorter part number if it was generic. The Maxtor that died on me, if it cannot read the SA, the controller defaults to "declaring itself as a 10GB drive". It only changed the ID string, when it sees the SA and then it knows "this is a 40GB drive with four platters" or whatever. The controllers used to be smart enough, to handle several model variants, with different platter counts. You could do that, say, by always accessing platter 0 to get the SA (platter 0 would always be populated in the stack). As drive capacities go up, the odds of holding a spares table in that external EEPROM go down. Paul |
#57
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Recommend data recovery company?
On 2018-04-30 21:35, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , B00ze writes: On 2018-04-30 07:33, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote: [] Well, not calibration, but you'd still need whichever chip holds the list of bad sectors and which ones have been swapped in their place. Ahhh, yes, now that's annoying; if calibration and bad sectors go into the same chip I'm kinda stuck. But I guess it's OK, I can loose some files, I just want the bulk of them... [] Unless some of the swapped sectors - either in the dead drive or the one whose boards you use - are ones that cover the partition table, master file table, boot sectors, etcetera. Hahaha, you like dashing my hopes ;-) Yup, if that's the case then I'm in trouble, and the recovery company will be charging me to rebuild the filesystem. Oh well, I can always (hopefully) ask them for the raw disk image and do it myself... -- ! _\|/_ Sylvain / ! (o o) Memberavid-Suzuki-Fdn/EFF/Red+Cross/SPCA/Planetary-Society oO-( )-Oo A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking. |
#58
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Recommend data recovery company?
On 1-5-2018 3:50, B00ze wrote:
On 2018-04-30 21:35, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote: In message , B00ze writes: On 2018-04-30 07:33, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote: [] Well, not calibration, but you'd still need whichever chip holds the list of bad sectors and which ones have been swapped in their place. Ahhh, yes, now that's annoying; if calibration and bad sectors go into the same chip I'm kinda stuck. But I guess it's OK, I can loose some files, I just want the bulk of them... [] Unless some of the swapped sectors - either in the dead drive or the one whose boards you use - are ones that cover the partition table, master file table, boot sectors, etcetera. Hahaha, you like dashing my hopes ;-) Yup, if that's the case then I'm in trouble, and the recovery company will be charging me to rebuild the filesystem. Oh well, I can always (hopefully) ask them for the raw disk image and do it myself... On an old dos system we used the NORTON utilities 8.0 to produce an image file. Most program files on the disk could be found, because each file ended with (tab)end cr/lf (fortran programs). Luck has it that disks were only 20-40 MB............. |
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Recommend data recovery company?
B00ze wrote:
It's hard to judge right? They ALL say the same things: We're the best, if we cannot do it no one can, we have the best clean room, we have the best tools, etc... I gave an example of one recovery service, ACS, touting the expertise of another one, Data Savers. They might be able to tell by telephoned description whether or not they have the resources to perform the recovery. Upon inspection, they should also tell you that. If they cannot recover, there should be no charge. They may even recommend someone else (who'll probably be more expensive to perform the more complicated recovery). Some places don't have a clean room or ferromagnetic microscopes. Like the video that I showed, some just attempt exterior repair, like replacing the PCB with those from matching donor drives and swapping the ROM or microcontroller chip from the old to new PCB (if needed which is not always a requirement). |
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Recommend data recovery company?
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Sat, 28 Apr 2018 13:33:39 GMT in alt.windows7.general, wrote: In article , B00ze wrote: 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. what specifically is smart showing? do you have more than a pass/fail? Calibrate and Read, they're both like 1 or 2 (out of 100 or 199 or whatever) - it can't read, spinning-up is fine. The drive shows-up in Windows, so the interface to the computer works fine, but since it can't read, Windows keeps freezing-up. It's still running in that old computer, I just disabled it in the BIOS for now. try it on a non-windows system. I've had success using Linux to assist in data recovery efforts on a failing/suspected failing hard drive, several times. It works when windows doesn't wanna play nice. Not saying that Linux plays really well on failing hardware either. I had a 1tb drive go south on me, without prior warning.. Toasting the superblock and the backup of said superblock. I lost the road map to my data obviously, but my data itself is still intact. Luckily for me though, I'm almost uber religious about backing up important files and making system images so I didn't actually lose anything when that system went down. I've kept the drive for the learning opportunity it presents for me. Recover my **** on a linux native file system that's sustained irreversable damage to the superblock and it's backup due to bad sectors being present in the worst place possible, imho. if you don't have a non-windows system available, try spinrite: https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm I have a legit regged copy of Spinrite 6...It's quite a program, but, it's not a miracle worker. If the drives in rough shape (clicking sounds) I dunno if I'd go that route first...As the last thing you want to do is stress that drive further. It could indeed be a mechanical failure in progress, and that can be very bad for the data on the platters, IF, it's still intact. Spinrite is also a DOS native program; You can't make full use of it under Windows. It's really two exe's combined into one. The MZ (Dos stub) is the actual program, and the win32PE file will tell you all about it. I think it offers to help you create a bootable diskette. It's been a very very long time since I've executed it under windows. What I wound up doing, years ago, originally for a former employer was to create the bootable floppy (DOS 6.2 I think it is) with spinrite on it, etc. Then, I read the floppy track by track and saved it as an iso of itself. I used that as my 'boot sector' for a bootable CDROM. And, it works. The cdrom contains other diagnostic tools, so generic cdrom drivers are loaded and mscdex mounts a drive letter for you. Pretty standard little floppy that's not so floppy anymore. These days, it's typically a dvd, but those can be treated like a bootable cdrom too. -- To prevent yourself from being a victim of cyber stalking, it's highly recommended you visit he https://tekrider.net/pages/david-brooks-stalker.php ================================================== = The answer to your qustion is FIVE TONS OF FLAX. |
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