Jaz Disk Recovery for Demo--HELP!

[misslady]

Yeah, yeah, I know. I should have had a back up. But I didn't. So can someone please, please help me?

I have an Akai Mixer with a 1 Gig Internal Jaz drive. All of my usable stuff (a whole 3 1/2 songs) that were going to be my demo is on that diskette. Now, out of the blue, the machine tells me that there is a bad sector on my disk. I have tried to realign the disk and so on but nothing has worked. When I play the songs, I get anywhere between 30 seconds and 1 minute before it starts to skip. I need these songs and cannot reproduce one of them the way it was originally cuz there were ad libs done by me that were a one time only deal.

I've gone to the Iomega site, but they want to charge $300.00 for recovery services. Isn't there another less expensive way?

All suggestions, advice and so on and so forth are greatly appreciated.......Thanks in advance!

By the way--I promise to get either a CD burner or DAT recorder if I get out of this one!

 

[Jon X]

I would check some other data recovery places to see if they handle Jazz discs, and maybe they will be cheaper than Iomega. Altough, Iomega would probably be better at it on their own media. What format does the Akai use for the discs? If it's some proprietary format, then have you contacted Akai directly about recovery options? I doubt they would be able to do anything, but you never know. IF the Akai mixer format is a format that can be read and copied by your computer, can you get access to a Jaz drive that can be connected to the computer? If so, I have seen Jaz disc errors that won't allow use of the material on the disc, but will allow for copying. I had a Jaz disc with bad sectors that I was able to copy to a hard drive and it actually allowed me access to most of the data after the copy. Just throwing out ideas in case you haven't tried some of this stuff... I feel for ya, as I lost several weeks of work once due to a Jaz disc. My Jaz drive is currently MIA, and I have no intention of ever trying to find it again.

Most reputable places don't charge you unless they actually recover data, so maybe $300 really isn't that much when you are talking irreplacable material. Good luck.

 

[fire.is.real]

go with iomega

i work at a computer repair shop and sometimes people come in with problems similar to yours. we outsource them to companies who charge 10x that much to extract a gig of data off of a drive with bad sectors.

i wouldn't have been suprised if you had told me it would cost $800 from iomega. we've seen bills for that shit that were like $3,000.

good luck and back up next time!

(also, have your akai checked out to make sure that the drive will not damage future disks. a bad sector is a physical defect on the disk surface caused by a malfunction in the data arm in a disk drive. since jaz drives are essentially hard drives with removable disk platters, there is great potential for a recurrence of this since all disks share the same arm.)