Re: hard drive crash.. anyone do repairs?

["Tom Greene" <tom@cowgod.org>]

aiiadict@gmail.com wrote:
> I've been looking for a replacement drive for the circuit
> ... no luck so far....
>
> There was a computer store in a town I lived in...  they
> charged $500 for recovering data off drives.  They would
> stockpile hard drives, and fix them by switching out the
> boards...
>
> I wonder if there is a machine
> somewhere that will power up the drive motor, and start moving the
> heads
> around... figure out what is what, and transfer it to another device.
>

I know a guy who recently had a dead drive which he sent to Ontrack for
evaluation to see if it was recoverable. After they confirmed the disk
was recoverable, he paid their evaluation fee (something like $100) and
had them return the drive to him.

It seems in the process of evaluating the disk, they swapped out the
board, thereby repairing the drive enough that he could recover the
data himself.

Tom