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07/05/2008 11:56:27 AM · #1 |
Last month my internal Hard Drive failed. It was backed up to about 4 weeks prior. Luck would have it that in that 4 weeks I shot an air show, a GTG and some other cool things totaling about 700 images. So I want to get that data off the drive.
The drive was clicking and won't slave so I want to send it out for recovery. Since it's clicking I am assuming the problem is in the drive hardware itself and the platter is likely to be intact.
A search of google comes up with an amazing plethora of entities offering this. Some are offering clean rooms that meet NASA standards but probably charge many hundreds if not thousands of dollars. At the other end of the spectrum are guys that seem to be doing this at their dining room table.
Can anyone recommend a vendor that does this at a reasonable price?
Thanks in advance. |
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07/05/2008 12:39:05 PM · #2 |
No, I need the same thing. :-(
The computer store I trust recommends DriveSavers, but they are not cheap.
Be sure to check out their Museum of Bizarre Disk-asters ... :-)
Message edited by author 2008-07-05 12:42:09. |
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07/05/2008 01:56:25 PM · #3 |
| Look in computer magazine such as PC Mag and look at the adds that are usually all the way in the back. There are bunch of companies that do recovery. |
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07/05/2008 02:48:49 PM · #4 |
No competent recovery service is going to be cheap. If the drive is truly inaccessible, the usual strategy is to swap the control board with one from a good drive of the same model. If that doesn't work (failure is internal to the drive mechanism) then the disks must be swapped to a known-good drive. That is where clean rooms are necessary. All this is labor-intensive.
The kitchen-table guys are just going to freeze the drive and try to pull data off it before it warms up. May work, may not. |
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07/05/2008 03:43:42 PM · #5 |
I went through this a few years ago. My hard drive on my laptop at work crashed, and I wanted to recover some files off of it. My boss agreed to pay for an estimate ($50?). We used OnTrack, who I believe to be a trusted name. It's been a while, but we sent it in, and in a few days we got back a flat rate estimate and a full report listing the files that could be restored and to what degree. The estimate was somewhere between $500 and $800, I think. Since I had nothing critical on the drive (just some things I would like to have had back), we decided not to pursue it further. They sent the drive back quickly, and it was intact.
EDIT: I'd also Google around. If you can slave the drive to a working PC, there is software and other tips and tricks to try that may or may not work depending on what's wrong with it. If it's mechanical, I remember reading that something as simple as turning the drive upside down worked long enough in some instances to allow people to pull files off the drive. It's a long shot, but I'd exhaust all other options before pursuing a recovery service.
Message edited by author 2008-07-05 15:48:39. |
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07/05/2008 04:02:11 PM · #6 |
| The only problem with trying "tricks" yourself is that if the problem is mechanical -- I believe my drive has something warped due to running in excessively hot conditions -- you run the risk of physically damaging the platter surface, and greatly lowering (if not eliminating) any chance of recovery. |
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07/05/2008 04:12:49 PM · #7 |
Have you tried the "freeze it" routine yet? Another thing that may work is to orient it in a different position and see if it will run.
As the General warned though, running it at all may be scratching the disc surface if it is ticking when it tries to run.
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07/05/2008 04:32:38 PM · #8 |
| Specifically what is the "freeze it" method? |
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07/05/2008 04:37:57 PM · #9 |
Originally posted by photodude:
Specifically what is the "freeze it" method? |
This refers to placing the drive in a plastic bag and putting it in the freezer, then hooking it up as a slave while still cold and trying to get data off of it.
Reportedly this has worked for some. I'd do it only as a last resort. One word of warning on this: the air inside the drive has the same humidity as the air outside the drive. This will almost *always* result in condensation/frost forming inside the drive when you freeze it. Can't be good when you power it up. If I were to try this, I would place the drive in a bag with fresh desiccant for a few *days* to let the moisture diffuse out of the drive. Then freeze. |
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07/05/2008 04:40:37 PM · #10 |
Originally posted by photodude:
Specifically what is the "freeze it" method? |
I thought it was some sort of solution that involved time-travel.
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07/05/2008 05:29:12 PM · #11 |
Originally posted by GeneralE:
The only problem with trying "tricks" yourself is that if the problem is mechanical -- I believe my drive has something warped due to running in excessively hot conditions -- you run the risk of physically damaging the platter surface, and greatly lowering (if not eliminating) any chance of recovery. |
Good point. Every situation is a little bit different. In my case, the drive was responsive and stable following the crash, except that I couldn't access several files. I think just a partition (or part or segment or something) went sour. |
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