General Chat

[INGSOC]

No consolation but you're not the only one. I've had two major hard drive failures in the last five years. Fact is hard drives fail, it could be three years from now, it could be tomorrow. IT STILL SUCKS!
There is hope depending on how bad the platters are damaged.
They're the key to everything if they're badly damaged ie: scratched from bad heads etc the less chance of recovering your data no matter what method. The most common, is dropping or bumping the drive while the head is on the platter. If the drive just stopped working one day it could be the pcb board, and if you can find the same one you can sometimes swap them out depending on brand and firmware.
What were the symptoms leading up to the failure? If there's still some functioning heads you can use Linux command line software like DDRescue. I'm just going to assume you used some kind of recovery software and you got back files that won't open right? This happened to me the first time. I spent 850 Euros at a local computer repair shop, and they just used Linux apps to slowly clone the drive data while the heads were failing. I got about 60% usable files back, many are cut off or fragmented, the rest were corrupt. They would show the correct size etc but would not open. This is because data for one mp3/wav is not stored sequentially, it's all over the platters depending on what filesystem is used. Mine was Mac OSX Snow Leopard.

As far as full recovery, the big companies like Drivesavers will say work has to be done in a class 5 clean room, and if you open a drive anywhere else poof all your data will be ruined and that's complete bullshit!
It's true you don't want any dust or other contaminants on the platters, but you just have to use some common sense if you decide to open your drive and take a quick peek if you don't want to go to the pros yet.
The arm will likely be parked on the platter somewhere. If you see little tiny loose magnetic bits the heads came off the arm, and you will need a head assembly swap.
I'd need more detailed info on the drive model specs and what happened when it failed to help you further amigo. Been there done that.

Good luck :)