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On 12/06/14 18:09, tortise wrote:
> Would anyone have experience of or recommend who in New Zealand has good
> expertise in data recovery from a sick HDD, realising a few hundred
> dollars will likely be required. The recent Seagate HDD in question has
> about 10 click cycles on power up then spins down...
> Much obliged for any advice or experience that may help.

I had a sick server HDD years ago I managed to recover all the data by
putting it in the freezer over night. Then next day quickly transferring
everything off I needed as soon as I plugged it back in the server. This
only works for problems caused be heat obviously, helps with worn
bearings/shafts that sick giving them an extra thou or so to move.

Sorry can't help on the experts you can send it to for recovery.

Steve

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On 12/06/14 18:09, tortise wrote:
> Would anyone have experience of or recommend who in New Zealand has
> good expertise in data recovery from a sick HDD, realising a few
> hundred dollars will likely be required. The recent Seagate HDD in
> question has about 10 click cycles on power up then spins down...
> Much obliged for any advice or experience that may help.

First thing is STOP USING THE DRIVE! RIGHT NOW!
If its dying, there's an unknown about how much life it has left. Since
you're talking about proper data recovery, its worth doing everything
possible to make the recovery a success.


- Bill shock -
Then, ask the end user to value their data - what's the cost of redoing
a couple documents?
If its their complete life's photographic history, is it worth $200?
$2000? $20,000?
If its a bunch of recorded TV programmes, just buy some new drives and
move on.

Everything is recoverable as long as the disk surface is intact....
Peter Gutman once recovered data from a fragment of a drive, using an
optical technique.
https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html (yes its old)

To answer your question, I used datalab once and they did the job
nicely. It cost a significant amount of money but that was years ago.
There are a couple of other similar services now offering a "no data no
fee" policy.


Finally, obligatory putting the boot in for lack of backups. You know
every other response will contain "if its important, it should have been
backed up" I personally hate cloud, but this could have been a
solution, as is proper RAID, time machine, windows backup, a pen drive,
paper copies, any number of safety nets. Make sure the new storage is
really backed up for next time.

--
Criggie

http://criggie.org.nz/


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On 12/06/14 19:07, Steve Nicholson wrote:
> On 12/06/14 18:09, tortise wrote:
>> Would anyone have experience of or recommend who in New Zealand has good
>> expertise in data recovery from a sick HDD, realising a few hundred
>> dollars will likely be required. The recent Seagate HDD in question has
>> about 10 click cycles on power up then spins down...
>> Much obliged for any advice or experience that may help.
>
> I had a sick server HDD years ago I managed to recover all the data by
> putting it in the freezer over night. Then next day quickly
> transferring everything off I needed as soon as I plugged it back in
> the server. This only works for problems caused be heat obviously,
> helps with worn bearings/shafts that sick giving them an extra thou or
> so to move.

The more you mess about with it, the less likely data recovery will
succeed.
Since its valuable enough to consider spending money on recovery, best
to not do the home techniques like this.

Then again this is the mythtv mailing list - if its just TV data then
buy two new drives.

--
Criggie

http://criggie.org.nz/


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My friend David at Data Recovery Services knows his stuff. Not site if that
supplies to Linux though.

Google search for DRS in Christchurch.

Robert Fisher
On 12 Jun 2014 18:11, "tortise" <tortise@paradise.net.nz> wrote:

> Would anyone have experience of or recommend who in New Zealand has good
> expertise in data recovery from a sick HDD, realising a few hundred dollars
> will likely be required. The recent Seagate HDD in question has about 10
> click cycles on power up then spins down...
> Much obliged for any advice or experience that may help.
>
> _______________________________________________
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> mythtvnz@lists.linuxnut.co.nz
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>

On 12/06/2014 6:09 p.m., tortise wrote:
> Would anyone have experience of or recommend who in New Zealand has
> good expertise in data recovery from a sick HDD, realising a few
> hundred dollars will likely be required. The recent Seagate HDD in
> question has about 10 click cycles on power up then spins down...
> Much obliged for any advice or experience that may help.
>
> _______________________________________________
> mythtvnz mailing list
> mythtvnz@lists.linuxnut.co.nz
> http://lists.ourshack.com/mailman/listinfo/mythtvnz
> Archives http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/mythtvnz/
I'd suggest getting and running Spinrite ($US89 from www.grc.com) on
it. If anything is going to recover data on it, that will. You
download an .iso, burn a CD or bootable USB and boot it up. It may take
a while to do it's work (like 24-48 hrs for 1TB drive) I've had good
experiences from using it.

Dave


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On 12/06/14 20:20, David Shepherd wrote:
>
> On 12/06/2014 6:09 p.m., tortise wrote:
>> The recent Seagate HDD in question has about 10 click cycles on power
>> up then spins down...
>>
> I'd suggest getting and running Spinrite ($US89 from www.grc.com) on
> it. If anything is going to recover data on it, that will. You
> download an .iso, burn a CD or bootable USB and boot it up. It may
> take a while to do it's work (like 24-48 hrs for 1TB drive) I've had
> good experiences from using it.

Waste of time and money - the drive runs for under 30 seconds, clicking
all the time. Spinrite won't have hours in which to work.

--
Criggie

http://criggie.org.nz/


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On 12/06/2014 7:09 p.m., criggie wrote:
>
> Finally, obligatory putting the boot in for lack of backups. You know
> every other response will contain "if its important, it should have been
> backed up" I personally hate cloud, but this could have been a
> solution, as is proper RAID, time machine, windows backup, a pen drive,
> paper copies, any number of safety nets. Make sure the new storage is
> really backed up for next time.

Thanks for the replies, the phrase "preaching to the converted" comes to
mind...along with thoughts of reincarnation of conversions and ones own
preachings....!!! I'll not bore the list with the series of partially
valid excuses.... Suffice to say its not a total loss, yet its still of
enough nuisance to warrant the three figure expenditure.... and no its
not a myth recording disc, however I know there will be listers in this
boat sooner or later who could be the meat in the sandwich getting some
serious pressure to fix similar....with WAF possibly the source of the
torque on the rack...!!!

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On 12/06/2014 7:09 p.m., criggie wrote:

>Thanks for the replies, the phrase "preaching to the converted" comes to
>mind...along with thoughts of reincarnation of conversions and ones own
>preachings....!!! I'll not bore the list with the series of partially
>valid excuses.... Suffice to say its not a total loss, yet its still of
>enough nuisance to warrant the three figure expenditure.... and no its
>not a myth recording disc, however I know there will be listers in this
>boat sooner or later who could be the meat in the sandwich getting some
>serious pressure to fix similar....with WAF possibly the source of the
>torque on the rack...!!!


Speaking of torque, I read an interesting article about frame distortion
in HDDs, causing head crashes
& the clicks-of-death. One of the methods discussed prior to physical
repair, was to back off the
cover-screws a quarter turn and then re-torque them with a
"torquemaster" screwdriver. Apparently
this fixed a number of the drives right there!
The article then went on to discuss swapping the platters to a known
good drive of an identical
model type.

Damn... html reply... sorreeee.


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On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 09:57:56PM +1200, tortise wrote:
> recording disc, however I know there will be listers in this boat sooner or
> later who could be the meat in the sandwich getting some serious pressure to
> fix similar....with WAF possibly the source of the torque on the rack...!!!

Not to forget the frog hanging by a green pickle!

--
"If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people
who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the
oppressing." --- Malcolm X

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