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the drive just makes an unhappy noise
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The disks most probably died. I have some ZIP disks which layed in storage for not more than four years and they all died. ZIP is a very bad medium in my experience.
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I tried to create a hard disk image, but I get "Hard drive image file creation failed. Error code 4:0."
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Try another image-creation program which ignores read errors.
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a disk recovery service I asked with said it would cost over a thousand dollars to get the data off
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Ask another sevice. Disk recovery is very expensive (usually about $100 per 100MB), but a thousand dollars is far too much. Tell them, you don't need a file recovery but only a block image of the disk. You can do the file recovery yourself, for example with DiskSalv. Recovering an Amiga file system professionally will bloat the costs, if possible at all.