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Old 01-21-2009, 10:30 AM   #24
Bobblehead
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Originally Posted by Titan View Post
But it can be done right? If I had the eleven herbs and spices on my external it could be recovered but at great expense?

I was under the impression that the only way to actually destroy a drive was to shred or drill the plates, or the whole drive, itself.
It depends upon the error, but in general you are correct, unless the platters are destroyed someone motivated could almost always get some data off the drive. But as H&L mentioned, the data recovery companies charge in the thousands to do the things you mentioned.

And yeah, Seagate just announced a firmware fix for a line of their drives that started dying like crazy, although from what I read, they are the 1.5TB Barracuda models. Drive heads going "click-click-click" sounds different.

Another thing that can sometimes work is using Spin-Rite (and I think MYK has mentioned it); although that is not a free program, I have known a couple people who recovered. Once again, that was not a head crash issue, that was a, "No Boot Sector"/"No O/S" type of issue where they didn't want to reformat the drive.

One of the cheapest ways to protect your drives is using redundancy and set up a RAID 1 (mirroring) option. Many people don't like that though, because you buy 2 identical drives but only get the drive space of one of them (since the same data is saved on both drives). But if one drive dies, you still have all your data, so you need to decide if your data is worth the extra $100 to stay safe. (and professional recovery will cost 20x that amount)
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