Data Recovery Part 2

After running dd for about 24 hours I only managed to copy about 900KB.  Then the drive started making a clicking sound, so I’ve concluded that recovering data from this hard drive is beyond my skills.  I may be able to do it if I had the necessary hardware and a clean room, but I don’t.  I’m sending the drive to Gillware to see what they can get off it.  I hate that my friend’s shop has to do all their transaction by hand, but they’re the ones who didn’t bother with the backups, a mistake I doubt will happen again.  It will be more than a week from when he first called me before they’ll be back up and running, but he said rebuilding the database from scratch would take much longer, so it’s worth it.

I’ve never used Gillware before, but I’ve read some good reviews about them and they seem to have some of the best prices I’ve found plus they’ll examine the drive to see if the data can be recovered before they charge anything.  I’m sending the drive overnight today so they should have it tomorrow.  I should know by the first of next week what can be done.