hosed hard drive help

[Charles Curley]

On Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:51:39 -0600
Garth Hill <garth at thrag.net> wrote:

> I have a friend who frizzled her hard drive.  I don't know the
> extent, but she took it to geek squad or best buy and they told her
> $1600 to get the data back.  Does anyone know of a cheaper or free as
> in pizza way of doing this?

"frizzled"; is that a new technical term I haven't learned yet?

What exactly did she do? Symptoms? Weird noises? Does the BIOS detect
it? What do you see if you boot to a live CD? Does the OS detect it?
(Understand that trying to boot to it could, depending on what
happened, destroy the data.)

One trick is to find an identical drive with the same revision of
firmware, and swap printed circuit boards (PCBs). If the problem is on
the original PCB, you should be able to get your data back. Or break the
new PCB. Yeah, I know, not likely.

-- 

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