[luau] hard drive recovery practices

[yuser at hi.net]

On Mon, 17 Mar 2003, Vince Hoang wrote:

> Does anyone have any [good] experiences of data recovery from
> a hard drive after a dd or fsck fails? I have never been in
> a situation where it was economically feasible to employ the
> services of hard drive surgeons in clean rooms.
> 

The place I work now has used On-Track (www.ontrack.com) twice in the past 
month.  "Not econmically feasible" is a relative term.  For recovery of a 
20GB laptop HD I believe it was over $700 and we recieved files spread 
across multiple cd's.  They are also in the process of recovering some 
corrupt MS Exchange db files for us also.  The media is fine, just the 
files are corrupt.  Actually, I had to copy the db file onto a 20GB 
hardrive and send that to them for "analysis".  I have no idea how much 
that is costing us but it VERY VERY expensive.  A person at the last job I 
had also used On-Track and they were unable to retrieve anything useful from the drive, I believe it 
to was several hundred dollars for the attempt.  Sorry for being so vague!