Quote Originally Posted by JimOttley View Post
Depends how it died Iain, a dead IDE or SATA interface on the drive can be pretty fatal at least it's not easy to fix, definitely a return to a specialist for a new board assuming the specific board is still available.
I have managed to recover a few myself by swapping the board from an identical disk. Where I work we tend to stock the same particular model and size of disk for quite a while and when we upgrade, we keep all the old disks just in case we need to recover an identical one.

We deal with academics, professors etc and for all their cleverness, they quite often complete idiots when it comes to computers. We always advise them to make regular backups of all important data and they all have plenty of space on our data servers which are backed up to tape daily, but our advice seems to fall on deaf ears most of the time.

Iain.