lol...there is less-than-zero chance that I am giving access to any of these drives to any other human on Earth.
I have just enough friends in the computer business to know that the split second any device is handed over, it gets scanned for anything of interest and the contents thereof become public information.
Phhht!
Win-weenie? That has SQRT-FA to do with a "computer" to begin with!
You don't know even one tenth of one percent of what you would
need to know to do a HALF-assed job
at f**king it up!
How much will you
pay to have ANYONE actually
give a shit about what you have on your HDD?
I've charged as much as $78,000 but there was ten million US$ at stake, it had to preserve Commercial Crimes Division, Royal HK Police standards as to traceability for a court case, and the wuckfit had erased it, reformatted it, locked it on PCB, locked the planar of the MB then scarpered-off to an East Bloc hidey-hole as well.
It did not end well for him.
And the outfit that did the HARD part, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada had it back to me in Hong Kong in less than a week for under $500, the brand-new IBM HDD it was copied onto included, legal chain of custody preserved and documented to international standards, public or spook alike.
It was what they did.
And why they got our bizness - from all over Planet Earth - at the top of the food chain, fast, no-fail, and fairly priced.
They had SIX clean rooms to do that work in. And Canada has more than two eyeballs, too. So who had to care if it WAS copied? Still "in the family", so to speak.
Wiser move for you? Recover whatever they had contained from your tarballs.
- Run a carbide drill through the pcb side INTO the platters, but NOT out the other side.
- Eyedropper muriatic acid into the hole, plug it.
- Let them bake for a week.
- Crush the remains.
- Then into a hot fire.
Did over sixty at a batch, last go. Rackmount server RAID arrays maintenance thing.
You'd have to know sharing FM space with New China News Agency?
Or maybe just have three extra eyeballs?
Oh. By the way.
Windows.... "thrashes". Bigtime. Can and
will physically wear-out a hard drive at five to more than ten times the rate of a proper operating system. One-year warranty HDD on a BSD Unix has about a five year service life. Pulled and replaced on "soft" fail. Never allowed to get NEAR a "hard fail".
"smartctl". cron it. Or go blind pounding sand.
"Server grade" HDD go obsolete ten years before they wear-out. If ever they even DO wear out.
Part of that is good drives (NEVER a "Seagrrrrrrate!"), stable and shock-free housing on reliable and close-spec UPS power.
The rest is a "file system" thing.
BSD Unix .... actually
HAS one.