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.

[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.

[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.