We place enormous pride in our quality of service, and our highly ethical approach to business.** WE DO NOT CHARGE ANYTHING if your data cannot be recovered. At worst, we may ask you to pay for return postage of your device at our direct cost. Otherwise - not a bean. Our services are utterly, totally confidential. Has another company already tried, but failed? There's nothing wrong with a second opinion. And we often succeed with another attempt. ** At 12 Nov 2015, we have never, in well over 20 years of service, received a single client complaint. /EndQuote
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formatting link
How much will it cost? Roughly, single hard drives cost from £375 plus VAT. The price will rise depending on the capacity of the drive, and the nature of the failure. /EndQuote
In both cases the on-disc file organisation is done by FileCore, so IDEFS v ADFS makes no difference. I presume it was F+ formatted (long filenames)?
If they can't handle the filesystem format, I'd suggest doing this in two stages: one is getting them to give you a bit image of as much of the disc as you can read, with holes if necessary, and then giving that to someone who is able to recover the RISC OS format (druck?).
FileCore format isn't /that/ complicated, but it does do file fragmentation (unlike, say, FAT) so files aren't necessarily contiguous on the disc where simply go through the disc image block by block would find them.
From what you've said it doesn't sound completely terminal so I imagine the chances are good, but I think you're right that it's worth asking a professional - it's probably gone a bit beyond the stage that non-specialist recovery techniques will deal with. (by which I mean people able to do electronic repair on the drive itself, not some bedroom 'recovery' outfit with a USB caddy)
Yes. Blitz interface which made a vast difference.
I've not yet had a reply from
formatting link
I contacted them using their web reply thingie. If I don't hear shortly I'll try them again.
Sadly, when I started playing around with the broken one, I didn't fully realise just how much stuff I'd lost. If I had done I'd likely have gone for pro help from the start.
I'm currently struggling with a 1tb external drive that crashed taking all my images with it. Thankfully I had subscribed to Google Photos some months back when I had pointed it at this drive and then forgot about it thinking that down loading over 750gb would choke it. It didn't and it did actually down load all the images, in the background as I worked, I assume, as it g ot no input from me.
I found that letting the 1 tb drive sit for at least 24 hours with no power would allow me to run it for a short period and allow me to download the c ontents bit by bit. Tedious but hey ho. I'm gradually getting there.
I am now using Time Machine on an Apple Mac along with a 3tb and a 2tb exte rnal drives. Hopefully this along with Google Photos should see me ok.
I keep work related data files on Dropbox as I use a PC in work.
I was quoted various amounts on recovery. Cost depended on whether the prob lem was software related or mechanical with an up front charge of about £
75 just to look at it and analyse the problem. If the problem was mechanica l then the costs would be in excess of £750.
FAT DOES do file fragmentation. Rather more than it needs to some would suggest...
The FAT table has an entry for each cluster on the disc. The directory entry points to the first one in a file, and the value in each is the index of the next one in the file, with zero for EOF. What it can't do is sparse files - a major step back from CP/M's format!
When I visited an insurance company client, they told me about the major system upgrade they were doing. They had (speaking from memory) 100 programmers working on it and 250 admin staff. I was taken aback, but when I thought about it, they were absolutely right. The admin staff were doing the testing of the new system, then feeding that back to the programmers. Besides which, the admin staff were the ones who understood what the system was meant to be doing, whilst the programmers hadn't a clue. :)
Ah yes, you're right. 'Defragging' wouldn't be a thing otherwise!
One other comment to Dave - worth chasing the professionals, but if the price is way too high for you to manage then I think there is still a good chance with a simple USB caddy approach for someone who knows what they're doing, at least as far as getting a raw disc image. But, obviously, the more you attempt to recover the disc the more it can deteriorate, so that's only a case of last resort if the pro price is utterly unaffordable and you have nothing to lose.
Once you have a raw disc image, then it's easy to distribute copies to anyone who is able to recover the data without having to risk the fragile drive.
I was thinking of offering advice in regard of the "Swap identical drive cct boards between bad and good drives in order to extract data from a drive with a faulty controller board" trick but never got around to actually posting my sage advice on this technique, sorry!
Swapping boards *can* work but sadly, as I discovered from bitter experience with a couple of 1TB Samsung SpinPoints, the *usual*, cavalier like ESD handling precautions (which in normal circumstances are perfectly fine) proves woefully inadequate when dealing with HDD controller boards once they've been removed from their host drive mechanisms.
The accessable connections on a fully assembled drive are quite hardened against ESD risk (but still require some basic ESD precautions). However, the interface connections between the controller and the HDD mechanicals which would never normally be exposed to such ESD handling risk aren't so hardened (probably on account such protection may compromise performance of the circuit without a costly redesign to compensate for such an 'unnecessary luxury' - after all, why bother when it's only exposed during manufacture whilst it's on an ESD proofed assembly line?).
If you overlook this difference in ESD protection requirements, it's all too easy to zap the controller's i/o links between the head actuator, spindle drive and (most at risk) read/write head connections between the HDD and the controller board.
IOW, you have to take the most extreme of ESD precautions (that is,
*actually* use an anti-static mat and wrist strap connection to the ground reference point of your ESD proofed workbench!) in order to prevent zapping those controller boards when juggling them between different HDD mechanisms.
I'm sorry this advice is too late to help you but it might alert others to take the extreme care required in the matter of ESD handling precautions when tempted to try this board swapping technique.
Can you get exactly the same drives as the buggered ones?
It's definitely not something wrong with the Acorn?
Is it really as simple as take the platter out and stick it in the known-working drive? Well, apparently not, but do you have any insight what went wrong?
My wife was watching First Dates. (I say this so you wouldn't think that I was guilty of watching it.) One of the participants was very short and apparently gave her height as "four foot seven and three-quarters".
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