Hard drive crash. Lost all my photos. Help!

[veyron253]

Hi all!
The hard drive on my PC has just crashed.
The engineers have now installed a new HD and copied over all my data from the damaged drive.
It has saved everything exept the photos which I had stored in my "my pictures" folder on windows. Gutted. 10 years of holiday & family snaps.
The guys have still got the damaged drive.
Is there anyway or anyone that can get my pictures back for me.
Before anyone asks, they were backed up a few weeks ago, but the backup disc was stoilen in a house burglary. Not my day!
Any help appreciated.

[Holst]

There are some data recovery places that might be able to recove the files.
I cant rmember any names now, but if you search the forum the same names will come up several times.

If this is the only copy you have the I would pay out and get this done by a pro, as you can mess up the drive even more if you try and do it yourself IMO

Its not going to be cheap though.

Good luck.

[AdeTuono]

I used a program called 'Recover my files' and it worked like a dream. I found stuff I thought had been deleted months ago.

[buggalugs]

Get the disk back off them before they skip it...

I've used 'photorec' in the past with good results or you could pay a data recovery company to do it for you. I rekon your chances are good.

[Mystic Slippers]

I had a similar problem when my boot sector on my hard drive got messed up.
If you can plug your old hard drive in a spare ide/sata connector or use the connectors of your cdrom ,you might be able to access the drive via my computer and copy over the files.
If like mine the pc does recognise the duff drive -i bought an external usb enclosure and used "power data recovery" software and managed to copy over all my stuff.
good luck

[Scraggles]

Brother uses a site called smugmug, costs £40 ? per year, they store all photos and mail u backup discs yearly, password protected if needed. The important ones are on my website, but have not made backup for a while

have to concur with the others, get the drive back, but having them in my documents means it is password protected, google for getting the password ?

[veyron253]

Can anyone recommend a good data retrieval company?

[TurricanII]

Ontrack - never fail! fixed cost between £500 and £1000 excluding shipping. They contact you after a £75 diagnosis to confirm what files can be recovered

[Mattt]

Scraggles said:

Brother uses a site called smugmug, costs £40 ? per year, they store all photos and mail u backup discs yearly, password protected if needed. The important ones are on my website, but have not made backup for a while

have to concur with the others, get the drive back, but having them in my documents means it is password protected, google for getting the password ?

Why pay for that? Just use SkyDrive or similar for free.