Hard disk recovery

[futie]

Does anyone know a company who is able to repair hard drives? I had an IDE drive crash some months ago and would like to recover some data from it.

I'm sure it's a hardware problem as the BIOS won't recognise the drive, and i've tried a few different machines. They all either ignore the drive, or hang when booting.

Would be great to get a load of pictures back I took with my digi camera.

Ta,
Marc

[xm5er]

Try Get Data Back (a bit of software), I had a USB drive die in a similar fashion but I recovered it using this package.

The demo version will allow you to find out if it is recoverable.

[futie]

Thanks, Mark - i'll give it a go. But i'm not sure the drive is even accessible to the BIOS, let alone OS or software ..

[Plotloss]

There is a company called Vogon who specialise in this sort of thing.

Its not at all cheap though because it involved splitting the HDD out into its individual platters and then recovering the data from there...

[Tripps]

Went through this around eight years ago when the development company I was working for had their development server (and all the latest source code) killed by a cleaner pulling the cable out the back when vacuuming while the heads must have been down on the media, causing a head crash and a dead drive.

We sent off the drive (not to Vogon as I recall) and the company dismantled it and gave us an estimate for recovery on the data and a list of the files they could recover and the percentage of lost data. The costs outweighed the time (and benefit) required to rebuild the source archive from the individual machines as it would have been around £20k as I recall
I'd imagine costs have reduced a lot in the years since, but its still likely to be expensive I'm afraid.

[ThatPhilBrettGuy]

If you can get hold of another of the same type of drive, sometimes you can just swap the electronics over and get the data back. I've done it before with 100% success.

What drive is it?

[futie]

Hmmm, good idea, Phil. Could be possible. I know it's a fairly small capacity IDE drive - not sure what manufacturer/etc (drive at home, i'm at work), but i'll have a look - thanks.

[futie]

Vogon are saying that in 90% of cases the recovery costs are between £200 and £400 + VAT. They have a look at the drive first, though, and report what they can recover.

The process typically takes 7 days to diagnose, and a further 7 days to get the data.

[Tripps]

futie said:

Vogon are saying that in 90% of cases the recovery costs are between £200 and £400 + VAT. They have a look at the drive first, though, and report what they can recover. The process typically takes 7 days to diagnose, and a further 7 days to get the data.

That's one hell of a reduction in 7 years, down to a sensible level.

Will have to keep a note of that as at those costs it would work out way cheaper than doing it myself if accounting for lost work