Not a DIY home job. Opening a drive should only be done in a clean room by people wearing "bunny suits". Otherwise, microscopic dust particles will get in and cause serious crashes almost immediately. None of it is easy and every step requires a super-delicate touch.. especially handling the heads to get them off the old platters and onto the new. This is why it's expensive.. Chuck -----Original Message----- From: tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org [mailto:tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org]On Behalf Of Subramanya Sastry Sent: Tuesday, October 02, 2007 5:31 PM To: Chris Barber Cc: tclug-list at mn-linux.org Subject: Re: [tclug-list] [Off-Topic?] recovering data from a hard drivewith mechanical failure I called them a few minutes back. They charge $100 for evaluation and then give me a list of all files and folders that they recover ... I was told that the mechanical failure recovery costs anywhere between $900 - $1900 ... So, I decided it is not worth it. Thanks for the tip regarding swapping mechanical components ... I wonder how hard/easy that is ... I might be willing to give it a try if I could lay my hand on a spare drive .. Subbu. On 10/2/07, Chris Barber <stuff at cb1inc.com> wrote: Lucky for you Kroll Ontrack is located in Eden Prairie and they are data recovery specialists. Not lucky for you because they are not cheap. Last time I heard they charge based on the amount of data they recover. In the event of a hardware failure, one of their strategies is to track down the same drive model and swap the mechanical components. There web address is: http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com. If you do use them, I'd be curious how they are? Expensive? Accurately? Timely? -Chris Subramanya Sastry wrote: Hi folks, I just had the misfortune of having my hard drive crash on me ... it seems like a mechanical failure ... horrible clicking noises ... There is some data on there that I haven't backed up recently, plus, I had used this drive as a backup for data on some other hard drive ... while this is not catastrophic data loss, I was wondering if folks had any suggestions for recovering data in the face of mechanical failure ... or what it might cost if I paid some service for data recovery in the twin cities. It is a ext3 file system .. though not sure that matters ... Thanks, Subbu. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20071002/937b58af/attachment-0001.htm