Hard Drive Recovery

[beastinem]

I have a dead hard drive from a computer that went Tango Uniform on me about 2 years ago. I took it to a computer repair shop and he said there was nothing he could do and was unable to recover anything from it. He said that I would have to send it off somewhere that specializes in recovering lost data from bad hard drives. I have looked on the internet and the prices they charge are OUTRAGEOUS! The lowest I have found is like $600-$700. I have pictures on there that mean the world to my wife and I. We traveled Europe for 30 days and have very little pictures to show for it since most of them are on that hard drive.

I live in a small town and there is no chance of me finding a local place that does it. So I was wondering if anybody has seen any sort of places like this where they live? And if so, do they accept mail in customers?

I have tried google and went through at least 10 "online" places already and received quotes. I am looking for a little more small scale that might not advertise on the net much and doesn't charge out the nose. I'm hoping such a place exists.

Thanks

-Zach

*Lesson - Back your sh*t up!

 

[Mr Peat]

A PM was sent. And the person I mentioned will tell you the same thing. Back that s*** up. I have stuff I want saved on discs and several different hard drives in case one breaks or discs are lost.

 

[Wolfie]

I've dealt with more dead drives than I can count. In situations where the information simply has to be restored, I believe your best bet is to determine what is wrong with the drive and transplant parts from a suitable donor drive. If nothing else, you could pick up an identical model on an online auction site and move your platters over.

The process is fairly straightforward if you take your time, have powder free gloves, and keep your workspace as utterly clean as possible.


edit:

Incidentally, depending on the symptoms, you could potentially get it going long enough to grab some data off it...You'd be amazed what some time in the freezer or strategic positioning of a drive can accomplish, but you won't get much time before it fails again. On the order of minutes.

 

[RichYhlen]

first question are you puter friendly
if so then it might be possible to make the hard drive a slave and be able to recover the pics.
I have done it many times when the operating system went snafu and wouldnt boot. You will need a secondary puter and you can google making a secondary hard drive into a slave

 

[investandprosper]

I'm pretty sure the computer repair shop would have put the drive in an external enclosure and tried that way.

Wolfie's advice is sound, but if you don't know what you are doing you could destroy any chance of recovering the data.

If the pictures are priceless, I would pay a professional to do it. If you screw something up yourself, you will find yourself gladly willing to pay $600 for the chance to get those pictures back.

Just my 2 cents.

 

[geldor1]

I kept all my pictures on an external drive in case my puter went TU. Well, the external drive went TU instead.

The computer wouldn't even recognize the drive as either a slave internally or as an external USB. I think the BIOS saw the drive but Windows would not, in several computers.

My brother happened to be visiting and had several recovery software discs with him.

We slaved the drive in a test computer and tried several different software installs and finally one of them was able to detect the drive and and copy my files. I was able to recover 1500 pictures out of ???. I had to rename and resort all pics as they were recovered as file1, file2...

I now have a NAS with 2 - 500GB drives mirrored.

When slaved as an internal drive, will the BIOS detect it?

 

[grateful1]

Sometimes, even setting the disk up as a slave, you can get a copy of the drive with Ghost or Dolly....or some such thing.

If you really want to get the data back, send it to a clean room shop and spend the $$$.

Yes, you can try the freezer and other disk swap thingy's...but if you want it back your best bet is a clean room.

 

[beastinem]

Sometimes, even setting the disk up as a slave, you can get a copy of the drive with Ghost or Dolly....or some such thing.

If you really want to get the data back, send it to a clean room shop and spend the $$$.

Yes, you can try the freezer and other disk swap thingy's...but if you want it back your best bet is a clean room.

I am thinking this may be the case :\ I would hate to screw something up to the point where not even a pro can fix it. Just gotta find the cheapest one. Like I said, the computer repair guy had it for days and couldn't get anything at all. So it might even be a lost cause.

Thanks guys.

 

[BigMacFU]

I have a dead hard drive from a computer that went Tango Uniform on me about 2 years ago. I took it to a computer repair shop and he said there was nothing he could do and was unable to recover anything from it. He said that I would have to send it off somewhere that specializes in recovering lost data from bad hard drives. I have looked on the internet and the prices they charge are OUTRAGEOUS! The lowest I have found is like $600-$700. I have pictures on there that mean the world to my wife and I. We traveled Europe for 30 days and have very little pictures to show for it since most of them are on that hard drive.

I live in a small town and there is no chance of me finding a local place that does it. So I was wondering if anybody has seen any sort of places like this where they live? And if so, do they accept mail in customers?

I have tried google and went through at least 10 "online" places already and received quotes. I am looking for a little more small scale that might not advertise on the net much and doesn't charge out the nose. I'm hoping such a place exists.

Thanks

-Zach

*Lesson - Back your sh*t up!

I'm not sure if they make a windows version, but Data Rescue from prosoft engineering recovered a completely dead hard drive for me. I was in the same situation, it was looking like I'd need to spend the 500-800 for a specialty recovery, but figured I'd try the 60 dollar software solution first. It worked!

It's gone up in price over the past couple of years, but it worked miracles for me:
http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue_pc_buy.php