Any recommended stores to help retrieve data from a failed hard drive?
 

One of my buddies had a hard drive failure recently and was wondering if there was any places you people might recommend to possibly retrieve some of the data.

What would the prices be like? (for approx 1 gig of data)? Do they charge based on amount of data for instance?

any help would be appreciated

cheers
thanks

How did if fail?

Some will charge by the gig and others will charge by the hour, and it's not cheap. I know some london drugs will do it.

http://www.actionfront.com/a_londondrugs.aspx

http://www.datarecoverypro.com/?gcli...FRo-awodqCzadw

Hopefully someone else can chime in here and give some personal experiences. I've done all my own at home and have never had the need to use a professional service so I cannot really comment on which company might be best to go with.

A few things to keep in mind though, ask for references if you aren't sure (just like you would ask a contractor). Also check their rates (duh) and their guarantees as well.

i need about 2 gigs worth of photos from a memory stick any recommendations?

London Drugs doesn't do the data recovery, but they are all set up with a company in Ontario to send the hard drive / memory card to them, and just be the middlemen. Hard drive data recovery can be uber expensive, depending on what has failed, but memory card recovery is cheap. Well, I think it maxes out at $300 or something. You might find that some London Drugs will say they don't do it, but that's only because they don't know how to do it, so just go to another one, or talk to the manager.

I worked there for 12 years, and never had a drive/memory card they couldn't get the data from.

I have a hard drive 500GB seagate that failed too. It was on an external enclosure and knocked it over while it was running. Now it wont spin and makes a beeping noise and I can't access 400GB worth of data. I'm assuming it's just the motor within hard drive itself is not functioning and the parts can easily be swapped out from a similar hard drive model/firmware. I heard of Addax Computer on Bridgeport and can try and fix it for around $150, way cheaper than other data recovery specialist. They claim that if they can't recover it they'll only charge you a minimal fee for time and labor. I still have to drop mine off and give it a try but do call them and get a quote.

http://www.addaxcomputer.com/

It's really hard to put a price on data recovery, because every case can be completely unique. Sometimes it could take hours to recover 1GB of data, and other times it might take only 30 minutes to recover 100GB of data...

But if your buddy wants, he can drop off the drive to me, or if he's not too far away, maybe even I can go to his place and I'll see what I can do.

I've done data recovery on probably 20 dying hard drives... there's only been one where I wasn't able to get anything off of, and like two where I only recovered the files partially...

I'll charge him something really reasonable, and only if I recover anything.

Damn can you help me out too? lol. My external is fucked as well.

i have performed data recovery many times using this app. it works great and is non-destructive. its $499 and up retail or you can "search" for it online. make sure that you remove the hard drive from any external enclosure and hook it up directly to your motherboard using IDE or SATA. if that doesnt work for you there are tips and tricks you can try like freezing or baking your hard drive before doing the recovery but that is a last chance effort and will probably rule out the option of taking the drive to the pros...

http://www.download.com/EasyRecovery...html?tag=mncol

if easy recovery pro doesnt work for you then you need to visit the pros. these are the only guys that i have used in town and i trust their work...

http://www.1stdatarecovery.com/

Like others have said, it's tough to put a price on data recovery. There are a number of companies downtown that I checked out to try and retrieve data off of server a few years ago, it was extremely expensive.

For photo's there's some free/cheap programs you can use to recover photos off memory cards. You can try using Image Rescue, it's free from Lexar.

http://www.lexarmedia.com/drivers/index.html

If you can find a torrent, you can download Data Recovery Pro, I've used ver. 6.0 and it works really well. Pretty easy to use.

I have a lot of free time on my hands right now during the week, so I wouldn't mind doing some recoveries. PM me and we'll go from there...

Our clients are mostly hotels and manufacturers, so they will spend as much $$$ as they can until they receive their data. We send all hard drives to
Aceon Data recovery 604-224-4357 (Simon Feay), they have a few $50,000 machines just for hard drives. We usually send ours to this guy and he charges quite a bit but i have never had a hard drive unrecoverable with this guy.. Sometimes hard drives are really easy to fix.. It depends on the problem, if you take the torx screws off and remove the chip, if you happen to have the same hard drive defective try swaping the board chip, which is 70% of most problems.... Depending on the issue sometimes its $2-3/GB up to $5-10/GB