OT: hard disk data recovery help sought

[GB]

What's the advantage of that?

My reasoning was that you can't rule out the possibility that the 'problem PC' *caused* the faulty disc.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , GB escribió:

The OP says the disc is working, the OS just can't see the partition table. This isn't going to be caused by a faulty PC.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Tim+ escribió:

An afterthought: how big is the disc? XP can't see discs with a GPT partition table (i.e. bigger than 2TB).

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well I see your point, but IME bad M/Bs don't corrupt disks to the point where they crash. Random corrupted bytes in RAM may corrupt a file, but not make it unreadable. Its far more common that the PC simply goes AWOL as code gets corrupted.

But yes, if you HAVE a spare machine by all means use it as as test bed

[Theo]

4-5 figures probably.

Theo

[Theo]

Once upon a time I removed the lid of an 80MB hard drive and it carried on working for two weeks collecting dust.

The past is another country - it doesn't work like that any more.

Theo

[Graham.]

The standard pictogram for PC/Laptop repair services is a harddrive with the platters exposed and a stethoscope.

[Alan Dawes]

14 years ago it cost me £400 to get the data recovered from a hard disc - the read/write heads on my main and 2 backup discs were burnt out due to a surge when a capaciter in the power supply blew up due to "capacitor rot". My complacent feeling that with 2 backups all would be well was misplaced. At least I learnt never to have backup disks connected to the same computer as the main one!

Alan

[John Rumm]

Somewhat handy timing:

obviously only any use for a subset of recovery problems...

[Adrian Caspersz]

A colleague at work had the opposite experience.

Took his non-booting machine (IBM MCA PS/2 thing with a weird IDE hard disc interface I've seen nowhere else) down to the laboratory clean room, ran it up naked, placed a finger on the head (for some reason) and the air cushion it floated on was suddenly lost amongst shredded particles of iron oxide. And that was end of that :-(

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I think they were quite common at one time. Both my Acorn RPCs have one. Although using the same HD, increases performance dramatically over the built in driver.

[Adrian Caspersz]

It was this thing, ESDI not IDE

[Bob Eager]

It may have been ESDI at some precise point in the interface, but the connector wasn't. What you saw at the connector end was actually the MCA bus. The integrated electronics included the bridge between MCA bus and some kind of bastardised ESDI. You couldn't use the drive on anything but the right kind of MCA system.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Acorn changes from ADFS to IDEFS. But the files on the HD can be read by either - so not quite sure what the difference is. Except in disc access speed.

[Clive George]

That's software, not hardware. Acorn used IDE like the rest of the world

- the IBM thing was a weirdness all of their own.

[Bob Eager]

It was still IDE in the meaning of the acronym (Integrated Drive Electronics).

It was mixed MCA/ESDI rather than what we now rather loosely call IDE (ATA).

[Johnny B Good]

====snip====

Or, as Peter Griffin would have put it, "It surely was, Lois... it surely was...". :-)