4 May
2010
4 May
'10
12:28 p.m.
In mid-March on this thread, I described an old IBM Deskstar
20 gig from a Mac G3 that died. I sent the drive to Gillware.com
for recovery.
My experience? In general, I'm happy that the data was recovered.
I'm unhappy in the sense that I'm out $800 without any explanation,
or new professional connection to a service I might need to use in
the future, and for the yucky feeling of dealing with clueless
and misleading customer service people. I get this feeling that
it's my expectations that may not be reasonable, and that I was
dealing with an industry that's known for bait-and-switch and
rough treatment.
I can see this from both sides.
Firslty, I can understand the company not wanting to give away all its
secrets. Presumably it has taken time and skill to work them out, and
they hardly want to help you set up a competing company. It's similar to
the famous invoice 'Drop or oil : $0.01, knowing where to put it :
$499.99. Or as I once did '2N3904 transistor :\pounds 0.10, knowing which
transistor to change in na undocumetnet prototype machine : \pounds 49.90'.
On the otehr hand, I do wonder how much would be given away if they said
what they had done. Telling you they changed the NVRAM on your drive
(which you already suspected was the problem) may well not help you fix
all similar drives in the future. I am not an expert in hard disk repair,
but perhaps if I give another example : If I told you that to fix your
HP9830 with a blank display I'd changed a 74H40 on the CPU clock module
that might well be correct. But it's not going to help you with the next
HP9830 with blank display if the fault is (say) a 7474 on the data path
board.
If it was the NVRAM only (and we don't know this), then there shouldn't
have been a clean-room charge, surely. The NVMRAM is on a PCB outside the
HDA, isn't it? And yes, if you take a drive into a clean room, you would
clean thge exterior first (althoguh you'd probably remove the PCBsm
mounting brackets etch outside the clean room amd not clean those up. I
am very suspiciouls of that (and yes, I am nt the sort of person who puts
little scratch marks on screws so I can see if they have been removed...)
I think what would bother me most is the seemingly random pricing
structure. If they had said 'We will recover the data from your drive for
$1000, flat rate' then fine. Pay them the money if they get your data
back. But if they are going to have different charges according to what
work they do (e.g whether the HDA has to be opened in a clean room) they
I think they have ot eplain what work they did to justify those charges.
Do you know if the NVRAM was replaced (did you mark the old chip, or note
down the date code, or...)? Does the old drive now work correctly? (Not
that I would trust it for any important data, but it would be interesting
to test it)).
-tony