Need some above-average tech support

[Parker Dean]

Mother has a Seagate 7200.11 hard drive that failed to start up one day. It seems this particular model produced when it was has a flaw in the firmware that causes it to essentially become lost and report as Not Ready on boot up. There is a process that can get the drive back in action, as detailed on the site linked below, but I don't have time to fool with the thing and this isn't something you can call the Geek Squad for. My question for y'all is do you know somebody or somewhere I could send this thing? She wants it back because she had lots of pics loaded on there that were scans of photos from people now deceased so she just can't redo the work.

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/128807-the-solution-for-seagate-720011-hdds/

[AJ Dual]

http://www.securedatarecovery.com/

We've used them before.

It's been awhile, but I've used these guys too. http://www.salvagedata.com/

If it really is just a firmware problem, they'll probably just bypass the controller use their own on special hardware, and read/backup a sector map of the drive directly for you and send you a copy in various formats of your choosing.

[lee n. field]

I think I'd prefer to see this from Seagate, before I tried it.

There's a pile of things I'd try before I'd do hardware surgery.

And, backup backup backup.  I don't know how many times I've had to tell people their hard drive is toast.  

(More later if you want.  Time's not good for an extended response at this instant.)

[Parker Dean]

Thanks for the leads. I'll look into those.

This is all ancient history in computer terms. The majority of these failed in early 2009 and Seagate sent out a firmware patch (which mother received but did not install). After the patch they were a little less than useless at helping out basically taking the position of install the patch and if you didn't then you're just SOL. Of course Mother's worked until sometime in late 2010 so I found all this out long after the debacle took place. I looked into doing it then but chickened out and it's been sitting there since. Lately she's been asking about it some, so now that there's some money to pay for a recovery I figured I'd see about getting it done