Anyone got experience of having this done?
The HD on my old Acorn crashed suddenly. Still spins up - just no longer recognised. No clicking, etc.
I have a second identical one (blank) which does work.
I thought I'd been good with backing stuff up - but in fact hadn't for a while and have lost quite a bit that I'd willingly pay to recover.
Is it really like they show on CSA that virtually anything from a disc that hasn't been physically crushed can be recovered?
Not me, but please do not expect my ignorance to stop me from holding forth.
One approach might be to swap the circuit boards on the 2 drives, and see whether you can then read the data. I remember, when Odie Ferous was first doing this work around 15+ years ago, he was forever looking for old drives so that he could salvage the circuit boards from those. I think designs of drives may have changed since then, but maybe these drives from your Acorn are that vintage?
But please do not try that just based on my say-so.
Everybody says that they will happily pay to recover data, until they get the estimate. I think the main professional firms talk in terms of a thousand pounds or so. I have no idea whether anybody can recover data from an Acorn disc commercially?
Roughly how much is this data actually worth to you?
You mean if money is no object and you have the resources of a government department?
I've already tried all that. ;-)
Ah. Not that much. A couple of hundred or so would be OK.
On CSA they seem to do it in minutes. ;-)
Is it really dead?
In your previous thread you said the message was 'Disc not recognised, has it been formatted?'
This means the drive is perfectly fine, just that RISC OS can't make sense the contents. In which case, the data is OK and you should take a bit image (using a cloning tool, eg dd on Linux) before anything else goes wrong. Then you can try to recover the filesystem from the clone without causing further damage.
However, when you asked about this previously you didn't tell anyone what the error message was. So all the messing about with swapping PCBs you've already done may well have made the problem worse.
Theo
Dave Plowman (News) scribbled
Isn't this Odie's site?
You can ask if they can fix an Acorn hd.
In the dim and distant past, maybe mid 1980s, when hard drives were
*really* expensive if you had to spend your own money on them, I had one fail after a couple of weeks, fortunately replaced under warranty. When I removed it I found that the rubber seal on the lid had evidently been dragged out on sliding it into the PC bay, presumably allowing dust in. Assuming this was in fact the reason for failure (and recognising that modern drives have much better coatings/lubricants on the heads and drives), it does seem consistent with the claim that clean rooms are required for recovery from an opened drive.
Oh indeed, in just the same way the reflection off a door handle in a webcam film can be enlarged to show the writing on a ring worn by someone on the far side of the room :-)
Given enough time and money a great deal can be reconstructed off a hard drive with not too damaged platters, the problem is that it takes a lot of time and a huge amount of money.
I hope so, he wasn't well a few years ago and he was certainly one of the better and reliable people doing this sort of work.
Yes.
It gave a couple of error messages at different times.
Discknight couldn't find the drive. Only the other one which was still working.
Can't really make something which doesn't work worse. ;-)
If its not been dropped and is quiet when it spins up its probably the electronics. If so all the data is still there and can be recovered.
The professionals will first attempt to swap the circuit board and then copy all the data if it works.
You can DIY it but if the data is really valuable you may want to phone a recovery company for advice and costs *before* you do anything.
En el artículo , Theo Markettos escribió:
+1. And messing about with putting it in the freezer won't have helped.I don't get how the OP thinks asking the same question in a thread several weeks after the first is going to get him a different answer, especially when he doesn't reply to specific suggestions.
En el artículo , Dave Plowman (News) escribió:
So what's changed since the first time you posted about this, and the replies to which you ignored?
I've asked about anyone's experience of having data recovered from one. As per the title. Not about DIYing it.
But it appears no one here has got any direct experience to share.
Over the years I have sent a number of my friends in Odie's direction,
Thanks. I sent them an email via their website yesterday afternoon, and it says they will reply within 20 minutes or so. But not happened yet. Perhaps an early start to the weekend. I'll leave things until next week.
Depends if the rust has been scraped off the the spinning disk.
We used to have a gouged crashed disk platter nailed to the wall with a slogan scrawled on it "Back up your data". It worked for a year or two. If its a head crash then your options are very limited. If the controller is dead then it depends is a repair or board swap fixes it.
Your problem will be that very few forensic disk recovery practitioners will know Acorn prehistoric file structures so it will be even more expensive than for a standard office PC disk. The cleanroom guys can get back astonishing things for a (very) high price if necessary.
I have had Dr Solomons (sp?) back in the day do it once for a CEO's disk full of irreplaceable stuff he hadn't ever allowed to be backed up. He never refused to use backup services again after that.
The difficulty is that you basically only get one good chance at recovery since a physical mistake with a dismantled disk is almost invariably terminal.
It's running IDEFS rather than the older ADFS.
The snag is not knowing what that very high price might be before proceeding. Some might think 100 quid high - with others it might be a few thousand.
Right.
He was always much cheaper than the big boys. It's good to hear that his firm is still around.
I suspect it will still be under £10k provided that there are no other complicating factors but I haven't used them in a very long while. I'd be surprised if it was ever under £3k these days.
I think the company I used has disbanded although you may find some of the guys who worked there in the same sort of business.
It is incredibly skilled labour intensive. A decent data recovery service will tell you in advance the ballpark figure. The helpful ones will give you two prices one for if they win and one for if they fail although the difference between them might not be that large.
ISTR that recovering that CEO's disk cost considerably more than a new high end computer at the time (and computers were expensive then).
My experience of this is a couple of decades ago so things have definitely moved on and some extra tricks are possible to read data that has been inexpertly erased or erased accidentally today. (again you pay a very high price since they have you by the .....)
At least some of them will do the analysis and preovide a listing of which files they're confident of being able to recover, and only charge you if you decide to proceed with having them recovered ...
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