On 21 Aug 2004 22:33:14 -0700, (Cameron) wrote:

e) Can the data be recovered and NTFS defeated with disk recovery
software? How much would this cost from a professional Company.

Assuming the data still exists on the magnetical disks themselves,
professional companies should be able to retrieve it. But that is
extremely expensive. About two years ago I looked into that when
one of my drives had crashed. Costs were in the range of $1000 just
to get started and then about $0.10 for each megabyte. Prices may
vary though, depending on how badly the disk is damaged. You can
always mail a couple of companies and ask them for a quote.

Companies doing data recovery:

http://www.ontrack.com/
http://www.ibas.com/

So it all depends on how much your data is worth to you. If you are
able/willing to pay the money for professional recovery you should
stop trying to get the data back yourself. Every attempt you make
can damage your drive and thereby make it harder to retrieve the
data.

accidentally shorted out the Primary RAID drive.

Two things can be wrong he the spindle motor died, or the PCB
with all the control logic got fried (or both). Since the PC won't
power up when this drive is connected, I guess some parts on the
PCB are broken. If so you might be able to revive the drive by
getting hold of an *identical* unit and swapping the PCBs. This
usually only takes a couple of screws and one or two connectors.
There is of course a risk associated with this. You can lose the
data on your drive if the new PCB decides to start writing to the
disk to initialise something. And theoretically the new PCB can
also break down if the mechanical parts of the old drive happen
to be broken too. So you can lose the old and new drive this way.

Good luck!
Danny Sanders www
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