Hard drive recovery recommendations

[cerise at armory.com]

I have a similar problem -- and have for a few months, though it's really
just laziness that's keeping me from doing anything.

I've found that pretty much every place I've gone to wants you to fill out a 
web form and specify what OS and filesystem it was -- even when "filesystem"
isn't really a meaningful descriptor in a situation like a RAID1 and "OS" is 
hopelessly irrelevent.

I had http://www.drivesavers.com/ recommended to me on this list when I asked
and they seemed to be the most solid of my minimal reference checking.

-Phil/CERisE

On Tue, Jul 17, 2007 at 06:23:37PM -0700, Asheesh Laroia wrote:
> I have two hard drives (160GB SATA Hitachi Deskstars) that just failed on 
> me.  They were pairs in a RAID1 set, and one failed 36 hours after the 
> other.  Summary: There's nothing I can do other than pay thousands of 
> dollars; can anyone suggest such a place? (-:
> 
> The symptoms are if you try to hot-add them, Linux eventually says:
> 
> [79893.436435] ata2: port failed to respond (30 secs, Status 0x80)
> 
> It seems to be giving link on the SATA bus, but it does not seem to be 
> responding to requests for data.  They also cause the BIOS to hang on 
> detection; the Promise card they came from simply won't proceed unless you 
> unplug them, and the Dell Core 2 Duo I just tried times out and doesn't 
> detect the disks.  (I've been trying them one at a time, but they have 
> identical symptoms.)
> 
> So I figured I could experiment a little with the first one that died, 
> because no matter what I tried I could send the other one to an expensive 
> disk recovery place.  I froze the disk, to no avail; I waited three days, 
> just in case it would work by magic, to no avail; finally, I just replaced 
> the logic board from a replacement I bought from eBay, also to no avail! 
> The second one that died I've kept in as pristine shape possible to 
> maxmize the chance that a recovery vendor can restore data from it.
> 
> So now it's time to try expensive disk recovery places.  Unfortunately 
> this is personal data, so I can't just expense account it.  Can anyone 
> recommend a data recovery place or tell a personal story of how much a 
> disk cost to recover, and how good the vendor seems to be?  I'm willing to 
> pay thousands of dollars, but obviously if a $2000 place is as good as a 
> $3000 place then I'd like to know that. (-:
> 
> Thanks a million!
> 
> -- Asheesh.
> 
> P.S. I've been saying to *others*, "RAID 1 is NOT backup!" for years, I 
> just never actually followed my own advice well enough to do backup.  Now 
> I'm backing up everything....