Hard drive recovery services?

[DJ Skillz]

My laptop hard drive just died. I have all my music, pictures and some videos on there that I'd like to get back.

I've heard of places that will recover or rebuild crashed hard drives. Does anyone know of such a place in San Diego?

[Dan-0-]

Sorry to hear. How important was that stuff. Recovery can be pretty expensive depending on the size of the drive.
What happened to the drive?
If it is still operational, just won't boot you might be able to recover the data yourself if you have a second computer.

[DJ Skillz]

I just looked up prices for recovery and you're right.. around $800. Damn.

I pulled the hard drive from the laptop and put it in an enclosure. Windows tells me it needs to be formatted. Right now I'm downloading FTK Imager, which is supposed to be able to image damaged hard drives. I'll see if that will let me pull the hard drive image.

[Dan-0-]

You're on the right track.
Good luck.

[ExtremeX]

$800 actually sounds cheap for data recovery, some places charge by the GB...

On the right track, hopefully it works out for you because its a total PITA when stuff like this happens, but don't get your hopes up too high.

Hard lesson learned... use backup software. Acronis has treated me VERY well.


After you get passed this, I recommend a simple NSA (Network Attached Storage) device + Acronis software + automated daily backup (GFS Backup Schema)... Once you set it up, you can forget about it. I have used it on multiple occasions for both system restore, roll back, file level restores...

[ejhc11]

How bad is the drive? Have you removed the drive and moved it to a USB ext. case? And, view it on a different machine? I just recovered someone's laptop data and reinstalled Win7 on a new hard drive for them and only charged them $250 for everything.. ymmv though

[bender152]

After you get passed this, I recommend a simple NAS (Network Attached Storage) device + Acronis software + automated daily backup

+1

As I mentioned in a different thread, my hard drive started to make clicking noises. Rather that just buy a replacement drive, I went the NAS route (with RAID).

It was a bit pricey, but I don't know what I would do if I lost all my important documents (porn).

I use the NAS as my main storage drive. If any of the drives inside go bad, I simply swap out the drive and the software is able to rebuild all of my data.

[rockdogz]

You can try some software solutions like this which aren't too expensive. I've used ontrack before and it can get pricy fast depending on what's wrong. I've also heard of people swapping out the drive controller of their hard drive with another one that they've bought on eBay if the controller is the problem. I've tried it myself but it didn't work - perhaps it wasn't the controller in my case.

+1 on the NAS which is also what I do... also back up the NAS to multiple external disks and keep them in different physical locations.

[IntoForever]

If the drive is actually working (spinning) try something like GDBNT. I back up and replace all my drives every year now after almost loosing extremely important data when the drive was corrupted a few years ago.

[jnavarro]

Are you getting a none system disk error or are you just getting a blue screen of death? How old is the laptop? Do you know if you have a Sata or IDE?