I guess I have a different definition of “specialist” than you... Knowing about PCB and EPROM swapping is basics.
Meanwhile, in the time since the drive was received from the client to now, DriveSavers would probably already have the recovered data on a server, ready for the client to download.
I guess you do oil changes in Munich, LA dentist checkups, and fly to SF to update software on your laptop.
Not everyone is ready to drop >2K for data, not every data recovery job is worth that much to a client.
I have not yet tried to read from farther into the drive yet.
I will double check the size of the recovery partition
stop trying to read partitions, dump whole drive to an image, skipping read errors
log where errors occur, depending on physical configuration it might be a blown head, bad pcb connection, damaged platter, is it reliably unable to read past X spot, or stops reading at all after X spot. ddrescue might be too high level for the job.
Could the calibration or error logs be so broken that it causes the drive to halt because it believes that there is something very wrong with that area of the drive and just halts all other operations because of it?
if its able to read at all it
usually should read the rest assuming working hardware, unless someone/something screwed with SA