Unfortunately, there's no easy way to get around this. It will probably cost you big $$ if it's that important. Ask around, and ask a LOT of questions before you commit. Find out what you'll get for your money.

I used a data recovery service that promised me near-total retreival, after we dropped a Maxtor HD from a height of 12" (one foot) onto a carpeted, concrete floor). It went belly-up immediately.

I gave their local office my drive, (here in Phila.) which they had to send to CA for the actual repair. I also had to pay upfront. ($1500 - non-refundable once you accept their process).

They claimed to have recovered over 80% of the data on the drive for me. Perhaps they did; I'll never know.... What I got back were PIECES of information, with all kinds of weird file extensions. They said it was similar to getting loose "pages" out of a book, that it was MY job to go through each page and put it back together. (Can you say Bullsh*t boys and girls?) I got lots of jpgs instead of full AVI files, I got back pieces of wav files (and since they were 24 bit files, all the standard 16 bit decoders or sorting software they used made them utterly useless, and so on...)

It was a mess, and totally useless. I had to eat crow and tell the client we had to start from scratch. (The client had spent 5 full days with us in video editing sessions to get where we were before the drive crashed...) He respected our honesty, and was equally impressed when we didn't charge him at all for the entire project. We ate the $1500 for the data recovery, we ate the initial time lost in the first five session days, we ate the replacement days, and we ate the final post-production to tie it all together.

Thankfully, we kept the client, but we've redefined our data storage procedures since then.

And we DO NOT use Maxtor drives anymore..... :evil:

Good luck, but prepare yourself for the worst. You may have to start over entirely.

Before you decide it needs professional help, answer these questions first:

Exactly what occured at the time it wouldn't read?

Does it make noises? If so, could you describe the noises?

If it makes absolutely no noise, are you certain it's getting power?

Is it a secondary drive, or a drive containing the OS?

Which OS are you using?

Is it an internal drive, or an external drive enclosed in a SCSI/USB/Firewire housing?

What brand, size and model drive is it? (I do not like Maxtor, either).

Answer those questions, and maybe there's a way to salvage something. But, then again, maybe not. Since you didn't describe anything, we can only assume you know for a fact it's damaged to the point of needing a professional recovery service. You have to exhaust all possible remedies before deciding it's a basket case, though.

Kapt.Krunch

i am in a similar situation..

doing a live multi-track one night, my computer was accidentally unplugged. i've got the majority of the audio files (.aiff), but they seem to missing "the end of file" code. like they're all several hundred megs (which is right), but they are all "unopenable" in quicktime, vlc, windows media, etc etc.

I assume that they just need the data appended that "closes" the file (and would therefore make it readable).

anyone know how to fix this??

-dg

I only assume from the aiff extension you run a Mac:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/filesalvage.html

I wonder if you could email me one of these files, I would like to work on it and see if the header/file is recoverable.