Amiga hard drive data recovery...

[drivethru]

How would I go about retrieving files from a busted amiga hard drive?

I tried taking it out of my A600 and putting it into my then newly-purchased A1200, but something wasn't right and neither the 1200 or the 600 would see it.

I'd like to see if i can salvage the files and use them on my PC with an emulator.

Can anyone help? Thanks!

[Thomas]

If the drive is busted, then there is no way to recover the data except to send the drive to a professional laboratory (costing about $100 per megabyte).

If the drive is recongnised by any computer, it depends if only the partitions are corrupted or if there are no longer any partitions.

If there are no partitions, the way to go is RDB-Salv or RDBRecov.

Once the partitions are back, the tool to recover files depends on the file system used. For standard FFS (and if the HDD is smaller than 4GB) the tool is DiskSalv.

All tools can be found on www.aminet.net

If you want to use your PC for the recovery, you need to set up WinUAE first. There is no PC tool to read Amiga disks. You have to add the drive to WinUAE's HDD list, then you can use Amiga tools inside WinUAE to recover the data.

As already said, all this only works if the drive still runs. If it's busted, then you can only let it rest in peace.

Bye,
Thomas

[drivethru]

Thanks very much for your help, you've given me somewhere to start!

[odin]

If the platters are still intact and it's "only" the electronics on the PCB fried, then changing the logic board with the board from a duplicate drive with the exact same revision might also  be worth a shot (if you can find it that is).

How is it busted exactly?

[ncafferkey]

Was it broken before you took it out of the A600?

Some people have managed to get data off drives whose electronics are broken by replacing the logic board with one from the exact same model (including same firmware version etc.) but getting an identical drive would probably be very difficult.