So i've got a hard drive here belonging to a friend of mine. It has bad sectors. It happens to have bad sectors right in the middle of his inbox.dbx file which he needs to keep rather badly. As usual, no backups were kept.
I've run GetDataBack over the drive and recovered the DBX file (400mb) minus a few bad sectors, and i can only really recover about 100 emails out of a few thousand. I have run numerous dbx repair utilities over the recoverd file, all gaining nothing more than these 100 or so emails.
Does anyone on here do more in-depth data recovery? It's a 30gb drive and i have a 20gb drive of the same brand and type, perhaps a head change is doable? I have never done this before and i am after someone who has, or can tell me how to.

the internets can tell you how to do it matey

http://www.wikihow.com/Swap-a-Hard-Drive-Controller-Circuit

stellar phoenix

I tried swapping the controller board on hdd's to fix problems before, unless it is a circuit problem it obviously wont work
I ended up chucking the drive in the freezer and it booted briefly, i got some files off it but not all of them and it died again

didn't work for ages, then i put it in the car and went to take it to a mates place - while i was en route the drive was sitting on my passenger seat and i was scooting down the highway, a truck pulled out in front of me and i had to slam on the brakes - hdd went flying into the dash and hit quite hard

after that the drive worked again long enough to copy the data off, then i binned it

still had to use stellar phoenix to get the data off but that's my story

last edited by tequila at 11:41:21 26/Feb/09

yeah, i don't think the controller board is the issue but i'll try swapping it anyway
i'll give stellar phoenix a go, see if that's any better than getdataback
and yes, i've tried the freezer trick, no help.

So I've never tried this before with a hdd but i'll throw the idea out on the table anyway, feel free to shoot it down. In the past when i've hit a crc errors or something thats f***ed up on optical media, one way I've gotten around it was to image the disc and clone to another disc, I'm not sure whether the same theory would apply to a hdd, imaging and extracting it onto a known working drive but could be worth a shot?

WTF? If it's a bad sector, wtf is swapping the controller board going to do other than give you that risk of bricking it altogether?

Good luck with changing the head on a hard drive without breaking everything.

so bad sectors are problems with the platter(s) rather than anything else, right?

Correct, the hard drive has failed to read data from a sector in the past so it flaggs it as bad to ensure nothing gets written there again.

If the head was stuffed (the part that moves over the platter), you'd be getting nothing at all from the hard drive.

last edited by scuzzy at 12:21:43 26/Feb/09

okey doke. so is there any program or procedure that will interrogate the drive and hopefully get some sort of data from these bad sectors?