hmm...maybe there is hope after all for an old internal drive of mine. I mailed it to drivesavers.com, a reputable company that is a last resort but expensive. They evaluated my drive in their lab and told me it was fucked. Well, they didn't say 'fucked', but this is what they said:
The hard drive had suffered from serious mechanical failure. The
read/write head assembly (actuator) had failed which allowed the
heads to contact and physically damage the surface of the disks.
Upon the initial diagnosis of a mechanical failure, our engineers
opened the drive in our Class 100 clean room for visual inspection.
Then the recovery effort began and continued until every possible
step was taken in attempting to recover the needed files. Though our
processes are proprietary and therefore cannot be disclosed in full
detail, please know our experienced engineers attempted everything
possible in an effort to recover the data but the damage was too
great and the data is unrecoverable.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to "undo" the damage to the disks
themselves. In addition to the data, the disks contain what is known
as "servo information" which provides the locational information that
is essential for the drive to be able to move the head stack with the
necessary precision. Given the level of damage to the servo
information, this drive was unreadable even in our clean room with
the failed components no longer in use.
Our techniques are very effective and in most cases we can succeed.
We very much regret that it was not possible in this case.
Do you thinkZero Assumption Recovery has a chance?
