raptor_pa

Yeah if you are not comfortable with disassembly yourself ( and some of them can be pains in laptops, tho most are pretty easy ) then best bet is to look for a DR company. You want someone tho who can do physical recovery if needed in house, not so much in case it needs it, but they will be able to do more low level logical recoveries. A lot of PC shops advertise data recovery and all they do is run the same recovery tools you could buy in an attemt to do a logical recovery. We see quite a few drives like this come through the lab that were looked at by others. some of them are probably in worse shape after the attempts. A good DR shop will have the equipment to talk to the drive using ATA and manufacturer specific comands, and to access the firmware areas of the drive that software normally can't access. Finding a local shop owever might be a problem depending where you are. DR requires a pretty big investment in equipment training and materials.