Here is the situation. A laptop comes to us with a dead hard drive. Unfortunately, the user needs some files off the dead drive. After much investigate on the internet and a merge of data recovery quotes we settle to try and recover the facts ourselves.
Luckily for us the drive won't spin up at all. I say luckily because the usual problem is that the circuit board on the lowest of the drive went bad. That doesn't mean that something else isn't the problem, but replacing the circuit board is the simplest thing to try.
Harddisk Data Recovery
The first thing needed is an additional one hard drive. That may sound easy but it isn't. You need an identical hard drive, and by identical I mean the same model number, part number, firmware, everything. In our case we had a Hitachi Travelstar hard drive that had three numbers to match. The prominent numbers were the model number, part number, and Mlc number. I believe the Mlc amount has something to do with the firmware revising but don't quote me on that. After speaking with Hitachi I was referred to a company called CueTech. They specialize in looking "hard to find" or obsolete computer parts. The wanted to fee in the middle of 0 and 0 for the drive, which I plan was inexpensive for the work required to find one. Instead of using them I decided to quest on my own and after two days, still had not found an additional one drive for sale that met my needs. We then started looking in house for similar laptops and found one that had an identical drive. Now we were in business.
Now that we had our drive, we needed to safe ourselves because the user wanted their engine back in working order. So before we started any kind of surgery we made a ghost image of their hard drive. After waiting the 20 minutes or so for the backup to quit we began the surgery. First we removed the hard drive from the working principles and laid it on a static pad with the circuit board up. We then used a T-5 Torx drive to take off the screws securing the circuit board to the hard drive. Your drive may need a distinct size or style of screwdriver. We then repeated the process on the bad drive. We put the circuit board from the good drive onto the dead hard drive and located it back in the laptop. It booted! As soon as we new it worked we then setup the principles to make a quick drive image. After waiting an additional one 20 minutes we had a drive image of the bad hard drive and our data was recovered.
To quit the process we had to put the circuit board back on the customary good hard drive and verify that it was working correctly. Once that was completed and the laptop returned to its owner, we installed a brand new hard drive in the principles that had the customary issue. The last step was to restore the drive image to the new hard drive, verify that it worked, and give the laptop back to the owner.
One recipe of Data saving from a Dead Hard Drive