Well, this is a pleasant surprise late at night to pop in my reader. Seagate has rolled out a DIY (Do-it-yourself) program to recover data from damaged hard drives.
Now, if your drive doesn’t power up, you’re still hosed and have to send it off to a professional recovery service. There are exceptions to this if you’re savvy enough to keep circuit boards from dead drives (as long as that circuit board isn’t dead as well~). This software will recover data caused by corrupted partition tables, formats or deletion of partition tables. The software itself is $129, but you can download a free software package that will test the drive to see if the data is recoverable before you purchase the software using a hexadecimal viewer to view file structure. Pretty damn nifty.
With the way Data recovery prices are nowadays, this will be a welcome addition to any technician’s repertoire (hell, anyone that works on their family’s systems). I pretty much only use Seagate Drives in the systems I build as their drives have been excellent performers, and when one does fail, the RMA process isn’t painful. Being able to perform a service such as this for a client without shipping their drive off will keep more money in their pocket, as well as mine. 
