Fried iMac drive -- Is data recovery possible?

[delta9]

Here's the scenario... I was happily working away on my 20" iMac (2 Ghz, G5 w/1.5 GB RAM) when my building experienced a power outage. Power was restored a few minutes later but my iMac wouldn't turn back on. One new motherboard later, my iMac is able to powerup (although my USB ports now don't seem to work reliably -- but that's another story) but my internal 250GB drive isn't recognized by the system.

I've booted from an external drive and tried all the common recovery utilities with no luck. Apple's Disk Utility sort of sees the drive but gives no options for recovery. Here's the drive info from Disk Utility...

Name : WDC WD2500
Type : Disk

Disk Identifier : disk0
Media Name : WDC WD2500 Media
Media Type : Generic
Connection Bus : Serial ATA
Connection Type : Internal
Connection ID : Device 0
Device Tree : first-boot/@0:0
Writable : Yes
Ejectable : No
Mac OS 9 Drivers Installed : No
Location : Internal
Total Capacity : 0 Bytes
S.M.A.R.T. Status : Not Supported
Disk Number : 0
Partition Number : 0

In Disk Warrior 3.0.3 the drive doesn't even appear in the popup menu (under the Directory tab). The drive does show up under the Hardware tab but the Test Device button is grayed out.

In Data Rescue II the drive shows up as a O byte capacity device and even a Thorough Scan doesn't discover any files.

The drive doesn't show up at all in Data Recycler X or Drive 10.

Can anyone tell me what's going on? Any suggestions on how I may be able to recover the data? I've experienced drive problems before but never anything like this.

TIA

 

[fryke]

Well... If all those tools don't help, there's only professional recovery services, but they can't give you guarantees and cost a lot of money. Probably too much, depending on the importance of what was on the drive.

If a drive is fried _this_ good, I'd consider it dead, dead, dead and not coming back. Luckily, you have a recent backup, haven't you.

 

[DeltaMac]

Here's one choice
http://www.drivesavers.com/
quite a lot of money. I was just talking to DriveSavers last week. A typical file recovery ranges between $1600 and $2400, and they will make every attempt to recover whatever you want to pay for. If you want the recovery fast, they will do that, too, for a lot more money.