hard drive recovery?

[rmd]

So, I have an old western digital "mybookworld" NAS, and it's toast. I don't recall if it was set up for RAID0 or RAID1. I would like some of the files that were on there. Anyone have experience with data recover folks? Any idea what something like this might cost? I don't have much experience with this sort of thing myself, so I'm hesitant to open it up and fuck with it because I don't want to break things worse in my attempt to unbreak them.

Comments

[cz_unit]

The standard question is what defines "toast". Is it a USB thing, ethernet, etc. Does it respond at all, corrupted sectors, etc.

Ontrak is my go to for screwed disks; they have gotten things back that were plain gone (ie: head crashes). Good bunch, but of course expensive.

C

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

Can you extract the drive from the NAS and access it via an ordinary disk controller? I've found my Diablotek ATA/IDE/SATA-to-USB adapter to be really useful. (Looks like this (http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Adapter-Converter-Optical-External/dp/B001OORMVQ/ref=pd_sim_sbs_e_3/185-5526907-8248743).)

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

Drive Savers (http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com) would be my expensive choice.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

I once sent a disk in to one place that had a fee ($200 or $300) to look at it, then they'd figure out what it would cost to really do the job. So I sent the disk in with a check. A week or so later they sent a summary of the number of files on the disk, how many they had been able to recover, etc. I talked to them and they wanted a few hundred more dollars to "finish the job". But it was clear that they'd already done all the work and were just trying to figure out how much money they could jack out of me before letting me have the data. So I told them to stuff it, since there were only two files that had been modified since my last backup and I didn't really care about them.

So the lesson is to get a firm price before sending them the disk, because any money you send them before the negotiation begins is sunk cost and won't be counted in the amount they can extract from you to get your data back.

[pywaket.livejournal.com]

I've had some luck putting drives in a sealed plastic bag in the freezer for a day, then taking them out, packing them in ice (still in the bag) and using ddrescue to try to recover them.

If you want more deets, drop me a line and I'll lend a hand...