Hard Drive broken from drop damage

[Whitton]

Hi,

We have a member of staff who has stored their life's work as a teacher on an external hard drive and no where else and has dropped said hard drive causing it to stop working. When plugged into a PC the discs dont even start to spin, instead there is a nasty grinding/clunking sound. Staff member is in a panic as they've now lost everything. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to retrieve any of the work? Any specialist companies you could recommend that would recover the work for her?

 

Any help would be appreciated, we are based in Kent if that helps narrows down ideas for companies to use.

 

Thanks

[neonetman]

We've used Kroll ontrack data recovery in the past. Don't run the drive any further, and book it in with them for recovery!

[stevenlong1985]

Hi Whitton,

 

Have you tried removing the harddrive from the external harddrive and plugging the harddrive directly inside a PC?

 

thanks

[tekins]

As @neonetman says, don't put the drive in again, you could cause more damage, ontrack are a good company, used them years ago.

 

Lesson learnt there I think though

[Oaktech]

We've used Kroll ontrack data recovery in the past. Don't run the drive any further, and book it in with them for recovery!

 

This... STOP... don't let the drive run any more.

 

I have nothing but good words for Kroll, in a previous life they have saved a company I worked for approx £2million after a lighting console for a west end show crashed the day before the show opened. The financial consequences of having to spend time re plotting and the delay in opening was just not tenable. Kroll turned the disk round in 24 hours and gave us 2 disks back to use!

[achedgy]

Kingdom Data Recovery, muuuuuuch cheaper than Kroll ontrack and do a good job!!

[dhicks]

We've used Kroll ontrack data recovery in the past.

 

Does anyone know if this was the company featured in the PC Pro podcast a couple of weeks ago? Just listening to that podcast, it would seem they have a proper clean-room for harddrive repairs and a library of assorted harddrive models so they can take pretty much any harddrive and re-built it from the base up. Other data recovery companies might not be comparable - they might be able to run a set of forensic recovery tools on your drive, but that might well be the limit of their capabilities.

[sidewinder]

Does anyone know if this was the company featured in the PC Pro podcast a couple of weeks ago? Just listening to that podcast, it would seem they have a proper clean-room for harddrive repairs and a library of assorted harddrive models so they can take pretty much any harddrive and re-built it from the base up. Other data recovery companies might not be comparable - they might be able to run a set of forensic recovery tools on your drive, but that might well be the limit of their capabilities.

 

Pretty sure Ontrack do that. Only had quotes from them but I'd expect any data recovery company worth their salt to have facilities like that.

 

The time when you really find out how important that data is, is when you tell the teacher how much it will cost. Someone here had a drive fail and desperately needed work back, when I got a quote back for £400 they were suddenly 'oh well dont worry about it'

[dhicks]

Pretty sure Ontrack do that. Only had quotes from them but I'd expect any data recovery company worth their salt to have facilities like that.

 

Exactly - so would I, but telling the proper experts apart from the people with a USB disk caddy and a copy of PhotoRec seems to be the tricky part.

[twin--turbo]

I had to send one off once for clean room rebuild cost £1500!

 

Rob

[Whitton]

Cheers guys, guna check out Kroll and Kingdom Data Recovery

[plexer]

Kroll.

 

Ben

[Whitton]

Ive passed all the info on, its a personal drive so we wont be doing anything for it. Thanks for the advice, she was thrilled to know there might still be a chance, lesson learnt i think.

 

Thanks again!

[rich_tech]

Kroll I dealt with for a staffmember here recently, would recommend, very good company, though recovery can be not so cheap, but again it depends how important the data is to the person.