Shortly before the move to Portland, my server crashed hard. I lost the drive with all the user accounts on it. It doesn't spin up at all, nor does it feel like it's even attempting to. The couple of machines I've tried it in have refused to boot further than the point where they attempt to recognize drives. Other drives spin up and are recognized using the same power and IDE cables, so I have a feeling that it's the circuit board on the drive that got toasted.

Of course, while some of the data was backed up, not everything that I want was. Oops.

So two questions:

1) Anyone have a spare Western Digital WD200 drive (or just the circuit board from one) kicking around that they could send my way? I'd like to see if swapping the controller boards will revive the drive.

Failing that:

2) Anyone have any recommendations for a data recovery service that isn't going to cost an arm and a leg?

There's a very good selection of cheap WD200s on eBay.com

Apparently this place is pretty cheap. First he just uses GetDataBack, but if the drive doesn't spin up he tries replacing the circuit board, and failing that I believe they'll do the whole clean room thing. But I think it's cheaper than most at each stage.

Looks like I'll be hitting ebay, then. I just figured I'd see if anyone here had something, first. It's the Empeg BBS, how could I miss?

Thanks for the suggestion. If I can't get the controller board swap to work, I'll give him a try.

Are you in a rush?

Not particularly. The drive died back in early December, while I was in the middle of getting ready to move to Portland.

PM me your address and I'll send you a WD200 via UPS.
I don't recall the condition of this drive, but it was pulled from a GX110 or similar and has been gathering dust for some time.

Wow, very informative video.

Yeah, the whole series is great. "series"

I can only echo Tony's sentiment. Highly informative... thanks for the link!

I've just been reading an article written by some Google engineers about drive failures. They use ordinary drives in their systems, exactly like the ones we use in our ordinary PCs.

Nothing in the paper said anything about postmortems. So there was nothing about why the drives died.

Well I suppose simply saying the drive had read or write errors is one way of saying how the drives died. I was thinking more, of some description of the root mechanical failure. (coatings, contaminants, parts out of tolerance...)

But, I'd expect that only the maker would be equipped to diagnose that kind of thing.

Well, I tried swapping boards from the WD200 you sent (thank you!). It didn't fit (phooey!). Following advice of the video linked above (thank you!), I found a drive on ebay with a manufacture date about two weeks off mine. If that doesn't work, I'll keep hitting ebay, waiting for a drive that has a closer date.

Maybe you can at least make a clock out of it.

More than likely, I'll end up putting it (and the other drives I end up getting while trying to fix this) up on eBay...

I suppose I could always use them to build a RAID, so that I don't have to worry about backups in the future.