Hard Drive data recovery

[rich_tech]

Hello,

 

One staff member where I work has managed to drop a 1TB Hitachi hard disk caddy, when powering it up in the caddy, it now doesnt seem to do anything, removing the disk from the caddy and putting it into a cradle, produces a mechanical "alarm" type noise from the machine (it sounds like an alarm but its a mechanical noise as best I can tell, which points to the heads if symptoms are correct), obviously this drive was used as a backup for all their photos and he needs the data recovered off it, so its out of my hands really here and onto a professional recovery company.

 

Has anyone used one ever or could recommend one and what are the costs for the recovery of data ?

[difinity]

Ontrack, i've used them in the past. Not cheap, but then if it can be recovered then they can do it.

No idea on 1TB but i paid just shy of £1000 to recover a 40Gb 5 years ago.

[Achandler]

Usually very expensive, but 1 question. If it is a backup of photos, then he would still have the originals as well so there should be no issue. Or is it a "backup" by someone who doesn't know what a backup is.

 

It depends entirely on the place, the only professional company I have used were for flash drives and it was £80 for 16gb

[rich_tech]

from what he tells me, its basically all the digital photos off the cameras hes had going back a few years, it was bought to clear up the space on his old PC, trouble is none of the sites offering services give any details about price either, its all quotes from what I am looking at.

[sippo]

Companies don't tend to quote til they know it is recoverable. They will charge for looking at it initially then get back to you with a recovery price, if it isn't recoverable then they will send the drive back.

[plexer]

If it was me, I would be advising them that the data is lost or at best far too expensive to get back.

 

Why? Data recovey companies exist for this reason.

 

If the person really wants their data back get a quote from one of aforementioned companies and give the price to the person or if it's purely personal documents give them the details of the data recovery company and let them deal with it.

 

Ben

[Arthur]

this drive was used as a backup for all their photos and he needs the data recovered off it

A backup where there's only one copy of the data? Surely not a backup then?

[rich_tech]

aye I realise what I typed earlier made no sense, it was his backup, until he had his PC rebuilt with windows 7, then it became the "ONLY" copy he had.

[athwilson]

Spinrite might be an option if the drive is recognised in bios. Saved me dozens of times!

 

If they are still using the original drive (formatted over with Windows 7) GetDataBack / Recuva could save files that have not been overwritten.

[Flatpackhamster]

Depending upon the condition of the drive, it may be recoverable using a piece of software like GetDataBack. I've used GDB for NT and FAT plenty of times to recover files from damaged drives. If you can't do that, I would imagine it'll cost at least £500 to have a data recovery company do it.

[ButterflyMoon]

I have used GetDataBack many a time. I lost 80 gig of photos following a powercut and it got them all back for me. Now I use it a lot when staff naff their memory sticks as it seems the best at finding even the most obscure files.

[Gibbo]

How about using a software recovery program (Ontrack) to see if it can get anything from the original drive - the one he's put Win 7 on?

 

That would be cheaper than trying to fix the mechanically failed one.

[nadeem]

If you can't recover via a software method (from above) then I can recommend Retrodata RAID Recovery and Data Recovery From all Devices. We Recover From Any Storage Device, With Any File System, and From Any Operating System. - have used them for staff a number of times in the past.