[nelson495]

[FONT=&quot]Hi everyone , I am employed as a manager in a firm. I have a problem that I had like to talk about. My system was working fine the other day, but while copying a file by nero….the system hanged and I had to restart it. But I got a disk boot failure error. Then , I tried to run a windows xp installation CD, but that is also showing some error message during installation and the installation fails.I did check the bios settings and the disk fails to show…and had it checked on another system also…but bios cannot detect the hard disk.I think the disk is damaged or something like that.The disk has important data from my company’s point of view…..that I need to recover.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Please let me know if there are any ways to get my data back from this disk!!!![/FONT]

[Dave Hybrid]

Short of sending it to a specialist company so they can actually take it apart and repair it you are stuffed.

It is also pretty expensive and not something you can do as you need special tools and a dust free environment.

[thingie2]

Yea, like dave said you need to take it to a specialist which can cost a few hundred pounds (could be $300+) and there is still no guarrentte to get the data off. So you need to decide whether the price is worth it for the data, don't you have backups? And just so you know, the reason why you need to take it to a specialist, other than what dave said, is that if the bios does not see the drive, there is nothing that can be done by programs.

[Dave Hybrid]

By specialist I don't mean some back street guy in the yellow pages.

When hard drives go fully software cannot save them and they need to be taken apart, in lab conditions, we are talking major money, I doubt a few hundred quid.

[serverguy]

Originally Posted by Dave Hybrid By specialist I don't mean some back street guy in the yellow pages. When hard drives go fully software cannot save them and they need to be taken apart, in lab conditions, we are talking major money, I doubt a few hundred quid.

Yep, you need to find a company specialising in serious disk recovery. They will strip it down and take the data off each platter individually and then rebuoild all the partition maps to make it make sense again.

The worse thing you can do is keep trying to use it, that will probably just make it worse.

It also cost a lot of money, but is worth it depending on how valuable the data is.

[thingie2]

Originally Posted by Dave Hybrid we are talking major money, I doubt a few hundred quid.

You may be right, I thought I saw a price around a few hundred, but it might be just for recovery with a program, and it will have been several years ago so prices could have gone up alot aswell.

[philthomas]

Sometimes the Hard drive itself can be fine, but the circuit board has failed.
If you can get hold of the exact same drive, it is possible to swap the circuit board.

The problem here is .... there is no way of telling, without actually trying it and obviously, if it is not the circuit board at fault, you have wasted your time and money.
Therefore, as metioned above, it all depends how much you are prepared to spend, trying and how valuable the data is.

[serverguy]

Originally Posted by philthomas Sometimes the Hard drive itself can be fine, but the circuit board has failed. If you can get hold of the exact same drive, it is possible to swap the circuit board. The problem here is .... there is no way of telling, without actually trying it and obviously, if it is not the circuit board at fault, you have wasted your time and money. Therefore, as metioned above, it all depends how much you are prepared to spend, trying and how valuable the data is.

That is basically what they will do in a lab, rebuild the drive.

Never thought of doing it myself though...

[thingie2]

they can do more than that in a lab though, they might take the disk apart, and read each platter with another reader head, meaning the only part they are relying on working, if the data still being there, and if it sin't, there isn't anything they can do anyway.

[philthomas]

Yep the circuit board swap can be done at home, with basic skills, but as thingie2 said, the Lab probably wouldn't bother with that, they would just use a "clean room" and dismantle it. unless of course it was a common drive, for which they had plenty of spares for.