Hi TechGuy:
I don't have experience with the 7270, but I do have experience resurrecting bad hard drives. I don't know what type of drive is in the 7270, but I'm assuming an IDE or SCSI? You can tell by the type of cables.
In any case, maybe this will help:
Hard drives generally go bad for one of five reasons 1) System info (boot track, MBR, directory, FAT) is bad 2) System info is unreadable 3) Drive has mechanical problems (actuator, heads, motor, bearings) 4) Drive has electronic problems 5) Data is unreadable
Problems 1 and 2 can often be "cured" by installing the bad drive into a computer, as a slave drive. The computer would, of course, have to have a compatible drive controller, cables, and OS.
You then boot the computer and, using various recovery tools, access the bad drive to copy off the data. If the MBR is bad, you can just re-write it, and the drive will be OK. Though you still ought to replace the drive at that point, because it won't stay well forever!
Sometimes problems 3 and 5 can be "cured" by cooling or heating the drive. The problem can be that the drive is worn, or the data's magnetic field is weak. With a worn drive, the heads or platters are out of tolerance, and the cooling or heating of the drive offsets this wear, and enables you to copy off (ghost) the drive. With weak data field, the heating or cooling will sometimes help.
Sometimes "cooling" means just removing the drive from the device long enough for it to come to room temp, though I've had to resort to refrigerating and even freezing a drive to get it to work. Sometimes heating the drive works, though I usually try cooling first.
Older drives (such as the Seagate 20MB drives) often had motors that would not spin up. The problem was actually that the heads would "stick" to the platter when the drive was off, and the motor did not have sufficient torque to overcome the parked heads. The "cure" was to box up the drive in its original shipping container, and drop it onto the floor from a height of about 3 feet! Today, though, I don't recommend this sort of "shock treatment!"
Problem 4 might be curable if you had an identical drive, and swapped the electronics board onto the bad drive, at least in theory. I've never been successful doing this, though I've tried.
There are companies that will recover the data from your drive, repair or replace the drive, and write the data onto the repaired or new drive. Those services aren't cheap, but they're usually cheaper than losing all of your data!
Time is money, but if the client is paying, and the client needs the data that's on the drive, then it may be worth trying to recover it. Only you and the client can ultimately decide, I suppose.
Hope this helps...
