My Hard Drive Dead - looking for low cost data recovery alternative to a clean room service.

I know that my WD Caviar (WD800) 80G drive has died to a hardware
problem. The bios cannot detect it. It makes a clicking noise. It
has a Fat32 format. The data I need to recover is in the primary
partition which is 50G.

Based on my research, it probably will have to be opened up in a clean
room and either the drive heads need to be repaired or the platters
put into a replacement drive. Unfortunately, I am not in the position
where I want to spend a lot of money on this recovery effort. I value
my data, but I question whether it is worth that much.

So far the costs have been estimated to be around $1200. I am looking
for an alternative to getting this data recovered.

I can handle doing the software data recovery myself. It is just the
hardware that I need to have fixed with the data intact left as is. I
can do the rest.

Please respond if you have any experience with this, much appreciated.

* First of all, i would suggest you use HDD regenerator 1.41
it will try to fix up bad sector, because u said your HDD has
clicking sound that may be cause by bad sectors.

* After that, use a software that can assign your bad sectors into one
partition then invisible/ hide it.

Hope it's helpful to you
GD luck

* use HDD regenerator fix the bad sector
* then use partition magic or others to assign the remainning bad
sectors(coz HDD regenerator cant perfectly repair all bad sectors)
into 1 partition ,then hide it.

hope it helpful

HomerR,

Does the drive spin up when power is applied? If so, then utils as
have been mentioned are probably your best bet. If not, try a
gentle! tap on the side of the drive when it is powered down. This
can sometimes be enough to jerk a recalcitrant bearing into activity.
Once the drive is spinning, get the data off quick! This trick assumes
the drive has ball bearings, not ceramics.

/\/\

(Homer R.) wrote in message . com...
I know that my WD Caviar (WD800) 80G drive has died to a hardware
problem. The bios cannot detect it. It makes a clicking noise. It
has a Fat32 format. The data I need to recover is in the primary
partition which is 50G.

Based on my research, it probably will have to be opened up in a clean
room and either the drive heads need to be repaired or the platters
put into a replacement drive. Unfortunately, I am not in the position
where I want to spend a lot of money on this recovery effort. I value
my data, but I question whether it is worth that much.

So far the costs have been estimated to be around $1200. I am looking
for an alternative to getting this data recovered.

I can handle doing the software data recovery myself. It is just the
hardware that I need to have fixed with the data intact left as is. I
can do the rest.

Please respond if you have any experience with this, much appreciated.

Porque no usas el hdd regeneration con este vas a crear un disco de
arranque con el cual podras reparar tu disco y asi recuperar tu
informacion.