hard drive recovery?

[rmd.livejournal.com]

Anyone have a recommendation for someone (preferably local) to do hard drive recovery? I've got an external hard drive - Western Digital "My Book World" - that's b0rked, and I'd love to see if it's possible to get (any of) the data off of it.

Thanks!

Comments

[ron_newman]

TechFusion in West Cambridge is often recommended for this, and their name will be familiar to you if you listen to NPR stations. On the other hand, some folks in this 5-year-old thread had pretty bad experiences with them.

[wintahill.livejournal.com]

As other people mentioned in the old thread that Ron linked to, DriveSavers is a really good company to work with for this type of problem.

Unfortunately they are not local (CA) and they can be very pricey, but I guess that depends on how large your failed hard drive is and how much you value the data that is on it. I have used them 3 or 4 times for work and they have been able to retrieve everything from the drives in those cases. I think their standard turn around time is about one week, they will examine the drive for free and give you a quote before doing any recovery.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

So, what is "pricey" in this context? I'm not even sure what I'm looking at as far as order of magnitude. (I recognize that this will vary widely depending on what the damage is, etc)

[wintahill.livejournal.com]

I can't look up the exact numbers at the moment because that would be somewhere in my old email archives. From memory though it ranged from $700ish to $2,500ish the 3 or 4 times we have used them at work.

The biggest factors where the size of the hard drive itself and whether you wanted rush service. The lower number was for a 250GB hard drive and the higher number was for a 1TB hard drive, if I recall correctly.

I consider that to be pricey, but in these cases it was important enough to the users to pay to retrieve the data and Drivesavers was able to do it. These were drives that would not spin up properly or mount anymore. I could not say whether it was a circuit board or other internal mechanical problem though.

As Teele_Sq mentioned below, it could just be a problem with your USB enclosure. It would be best to test the bare drive directly by taking it out first. You will most likely trash the enclosure doing that, but anyone who was attempting to retrieve the data would need to do that anyway.

[theorangebird.livejournal.com]

Mark Bildman, aka The Computer Handyman (http://www.computerhandymanllc.com/), resurrected my PC a few years ago and I definitely recommend him. His rate was reasonable, and he also came over to get my PC and brought it back and set it back up again. He's also a really nice guy. Good luck!

[teele-sq.livejournal.com]

What level of b0rked is it? If it won't power on it could be a problem with the enclosure, or even the power cable. You could excavate the SATA drive from inside the enclosure and perhaps read from it. Or if the drive powers on but the filesystem is corrupt, I've had good luck with Virtual Lab - - http://www.binarybiz.com/vlab/windows.html to recover files.

If the hard drive truly has a hardware failure (can you hear obnoxious clicking noises?) then TechFusion or DriveSavers is the way to go. I know of someone who used the former with great success, but she paid mightily for it.

[ron_newman]

Also, I thought I had a borked LaCie external hard drive, but it turned out to be just a bad power supply. That was an easy $40 fix -- just order a new one direct from the manufacturer online.

[smammy]

I always chuckle when I go by "X Files Recovery" on Mass Ave in Cambridge. If your hard drive contained any X-Files, you might want to go to them. http://www.xfilesrecovery.com/

[countlibras.livejournal.com]

When my old external hard drive started to make weird noises and I had trouble transferring files, the freezer trick actually worked. Wrap it up in a towel and then a plastic bag, and put in the freezer for about 20 minutes. Take it out, plug in, and start transferring files. Repeat as many times as you need/can. I got it to work just long enough to pull everything I needed.