I need advice for recovering a hard-drive? please read!

[Joep]

I am with previous poster on this.

During my daily round of forums I noticed your post. I am all for DIY when possible, but in this case ignore ALL advice where people actually prompt you to do something yourself. Even if it is only meant to get a clearer picture of the issue. Because everything you do from now on may worsen the condition of the disk. Which will decrease the chances even a data recovery lab may have. So don't do it specially after how you have indicated how important the data is to you.

This may until now be largely a straight forward job for a data recovery lab with the proper equipment (Like Recovery Force). Let them handle it. They have specialized equipment to clone the disk. And once they have that clone, half the battle is won.

Stop messing around with the disk, let a professional take care of it. The people from recovery Force and many others as well are trustworthy and take your data very seriously.

May I ask, how can you clone the HDD? like, would you literally strip everything down to just the disk and then use your own needle or whatever to read it? or like, how far would you strip it down? because someone mentioned to me that It could be encoded or something, and there is "firmware" which could have been part of the malfunction, and the only way to recover the data is to get the exact same model external hard drive, and insert the old HHD or a cloned HHD into the new product, Is that something you could do, or do often?

A disk clone is nothing else than a sector by sector copy either to another disk or a disk image file from which then the data is recovered. Depends on state of disk how much effort this takes and ideally done without opening etc.. Opening is only to repair physical damage to get to a state where disk can be cloned.

Cloning itself is done using hardware that control disk's behavior to some degree in combination with software to control the process.

Now someones mentioning encoding and firmware and all that only complicates matters so I am going to put it this way: If this were my disk I would steer away from all the typical DIY software to avoid risk of making matters worse. Luke in some of the posts explained at what probable cost he can do this and it sounds like a more than fair offer.

And Luke asked: A couple details you left out that would prove helpful are the model and capacity of the hard drive. Knowing the model will help us narrow in on common issues we would see with those drives.