I need some help finding a service that I could have sworn I'd heard about.

Basically, you send it to this guy who has a multitude of replacement hard drive PCB's, he swaps it out and see if that was the problem with your busted hard disk. Am I imagining this?

I have a client whose hard drive has gone bad. Sadly, she had not gotten around to getting Carbonite or some other service before the disk died and took with it all her Flip videos of her son from 1 to 2 years old.

Sadly, though, you guys might tell me if the hard drive is even recoverable**. Basically when I hooked it up to my SATA-USB adapter cable all I got was a steady clicking sound about every 2 seconds.

Any thoughts?

**that is, without sending it to a clean room for a thousand dollars...

ps- I tried the freezer trick, but that didn't work

I'd probably drop $1000 to get the data back if absolutely required. Tough stuff to lose.

I was under the impression that many of the drive recovery places had disk PCBs for doing the swap you're talking about. I'm not sure if it's something they'd outline in their product information though.

Yeah, my understanding is that that's one of the things that they might do.

Interesting results: Google for "hard drive pcb recovery" - without quotes of course.

From reading a few of the sites, PCB repair is the safest bet, since they all seem to claim that putting in the wrong PCB rev can cause more damage.

I'd question the likelyhood of a new PCB fixing a clicking disk, but it's possible. You can always give it the ol' karma whack, but I doubt that'd be much help either. Some people swear by the freezer, and I've seen it appear to work once. If you do get it spinning and somewhat working, I highly recommend rstudio, the company is a real pain to deal with but I've never found anything comparable for recovering files.

Matthew