Here's a quote from Todd Courtois's recent e-mail detailing the progress of the recovery process:
"Yesterday I purchased a new 120GB drive and shipped it along with the dead drive to 1stDataRecovery in SJ.
"They've worked on this exact same problem ('BIOS can't detect Fujitsu MPG series drive') before and are pretty confident they can recover the data. The quote they gave was $550, which is in line with other quotes I received from Lazarus and a couple other places who couldn't give me a straight answer about whether they'd recovered data from this particular model of drive before. Since the problem is so common and so specific, I opted to go with someone who said they had experience with it."
Elicia David, who's been coordinating fundraising for the recovery, replied with:
"I have a list of people and their pledges, it adds up to around $500, so when the time comes I will hold them to it."
You people know who you are. (Seriously, thank you very much for offering to contribute!)
Finally, Todd replied with one further message:
"The actual work should only take a day. If the drives arrive there today, we may get the data back by Friday or early next week, after you account for shipping delay and so forth."Posted by forrest at April 8, 2003 04:19 PM