Any hard drive experts?

[Pulse]

I need to get the photos off my old drive, which died last year in my laptop. It doesn't spin up properly, and taking it to a local PC shop didn't work. I am sure someone has mentioned you can swap out PCBs etc potentially and put the old platters in. Any ideas?

I know this is likely to be expensive, and that's OK.

Ideally I'm looking for some ideas on what I can do with it, some recommendations of where to take/send it, and ideally somewhere that won't charge if they can't recover anything.

[Zaxxon]

Havn't used these myself but a search for hard drive data reclaim returned

http://www.rapid-data.net/ £97.00

http://www.fields-data-recovery.co.uk/?gclid=CI-im...

HTH

[Pulse]

The trouble is, you just never know if they're any good or not. However, I've just spoken to Field, who say they can look at it for free and provide me with a diagnosis and tell me what can be recovered. I only need to get the photos off there really.

[manic47]

We've used Kroll a few times for clients, very expensive but recovered data that was considered totally lost.
Some of the hard drive manufacturers themselves offer data recovery, it may be worth trying there first.

[marshalla]

(cough) someone on PH might be in that game too (cough)

[Elysium]

If you can get the drive spinning, this programme is very effective for retrieving data:

http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

It sounds slightly crazy, but if you hold the hard drive horizontally and make a 'frisbee throwing' motion you should be able to get it to spin. I did this with a 500gig drive that was no longer recognised by windows. As soon as it started moving the above software identified it and I was able to copy 100% of the data onto a new drive.

Worth a try.

[Pulse]

If there is someone on PH that'll do it, I'd be much happier knowing I had someone I could hopefully trust!

That program... Can you use just the trial version?

[Ian_T]

Strongly suggest you do a Google search on Fields before even thinking about using them... Anybody wanting more info, please PM for personal experience, and links to others experiences.

[GlenMH]

Pulse said:

If there is someone on PH that'll do it, I'd be much happier knowing I had someone I could hopefully trust!

That program... Can you use just the trial version?

The clue might be 2 posts above yours....

[lestag]

Pulse said:

If there is someone on PH that'll do it, I'd be much happier knowing I had someone I could hopefully trust!

That program... Can you use just the trial version?

here is a thought... look at marshalla 's profile....