Harddisk recovery

[pyrre]

Any one of you guys got any advice to recover the data form a disk?
Its a maxtor 300GB full og private pictures an movies. including downloaded moves and tv series...

But the most sad part is to lose the private collection of pictures. parties, friends and family...

Symptoms:
It shows up in bios, like it is supposed to do...
It does however crash the boot up if used in internal disk controller. But form external windows identifies it and somehow mounts it. but it is unusable.
Partition magic is not able to read any file system from it.
and chkdsk report "CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives"..

[pyrre]

I assume this is a Windoze box - FAT32? NTFS?

winXP, NTFS

ne hint: do NOT attempt to in-place repair the filesytem of a physically damaged harddisk - always copy the recovered data directly to another drive.

That is something i am painfully aware of....


The disk is totally unreadable. or unaccessible from any computer or OS...
It may be physical damage. when powering the external enclosure on it appears the disk will spins up. but the heads don't seem to move...

I am uncertain if i should attempt to delete the partition and set up a new partition and q format it and then try data recovery...
But it is probably best to send the disk to professional recoverer's.

[pyrre]

Would it be possible (if i get another 300GB drive) to remove the drive controller circuit board and swap them. To see if the new drives control circuitry manage to get my old drive up and running?
Assuming it is the board that has failed and not the mechanism...

Would it even be possible to swap with a SATA controller board. since the maxtor 300GB drive has a very similar drive geometry. same size, same amount of heads and cache?
Or are hard drives more delecate than that?

[pyrre]

that is what i thought to. but the disk is from 2004. finding it will be hard... very hard...
That is why i asked for SATA... i find the Diamondmax 10 300GB in sata version in shops... and my disk is a Dmax 10. 7200rpm with 16MB cache... ++

Do or dare?