[PLUG] Re: hard drive recovery services?

[JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org>]

JP Vossen wrote:
> Short version: does anyone have any thoughts/recommendations on "send it 
> out to the clean-room" hard drive recovery services (e.g. On-track)?

Thanks to everyone who replied.  It turns out this is a known problem 
with Maxtor drives:

http://forums.actionfront.com/showthread.php?t=339
"If you see this drive as N40P, you definitely don't have electronics 
problem. So PCB swap likely won't help. Drive is locked in the "Safe 
mode" , by one reason or another. It's likely have firmware problem but 
could be a problem with heads/preamplifier , which will require internal 
work. Slight possibility exist that r/w channel chip is died and but all 
other components on PCB are working, in that case PCB swap will help... 
but that is very low chance, since majority of PCB work to allow it to 
be detected as N40P."

Also:
http://www.acsdata.com/data-recovery-forum/viewtopic.php?p=60
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060607205943AAYowDr
http://www.google.com/search?q=maxtor+%22N40P%22


I poked around quite a bit more (Hiren's Boot CD, GetDataBack and 
others) and got nowhere.  It looks like the choices are a data recovery 
outfit or a $400 bit of software from China I don't particularly trust.

For future reference or if anyone else is interested, see the thread 
archive here for full details of things I tried and recovery outfits I 
found: 
http://groups.google.com/group/pantug/browse_thread/thread/7788193bc4b15e10

Thanks,
JP
----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
JP Vossen, CISSP            |:::======|        jp{at}jpsdomain{dot}org
My Account, My Opinions     |=========|      http://www.jpsdomain.org/
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