Need Help! Hard Drive Died...

..does anyone know of a service or individual that is versed in retrieving info from a hard-drive? All our pictures & such are currently trapped on the old drive, and have been unable to retrieve or save to the new drive. (And we didn't back-up - I know I know!:scaredeyes.

Please PM me with any suggestions.

Thanks!

 

Yes, there are companies that do this but they are expensive. I paid $700 or so a year ago to recover the data from a dead drive.

I started with Geek Squad and they made it clear that they might not be able to access the drive but would try. The guy they sent was very helpful and set up a new drive and did everything he could to access the old. He suggested I take the drive to TTR Data Recovery. He suggested one other place that I don't remember.

It was expensive but within a few days I had all the contents of the hard drive recovered to an external drive. I think it is a one person shop.

TTR Data Recovery
8300 Greensboro Dr
Mclean Va 22102
888-328-2887

Yes, I do back ups now. Good luck!

 

What kind of drive? Is it still in a computer?

 

OK - this is going to sound nuts, but try it.

Assuming the drive is out of the PC and you have a way to connect it quickly to another PC, put it in the freezer for 5 minutes. QUICKLY, take to the working PC, hook it up & transfer like mad!

Depending on the drive type, I have a couple of external connectors.

 

The general idea is to hook the hard drive up to another working computer and then use that computer to try to pull the data off. You may or may not get any response from the drive. I've seen HDDs be completely unreadable without disection, I've seen them be readable for a few minutes at a time, and I've seen them work perfectly fine as slave drives (usually because the OS on the HDD got corrupted and couldn't boot, but there was no mechanical damage.) I would tell you that anything Geek Squad can you, you can probably do in your home without too much trouble. I would not recommend disecting a HDD yourself, I'd leave that to the expensive forensic recovery people.

There are adapters you can buy to help you hook it up depending on the kind of hard drive it is (SATA or IDE to USB) and there are adapters to power it. It's not really a scientific thing, I've had hit or miss luck with those adapters, like I'd hook up the drive and it would only sometimes be recognized.

 

Buy a copy of SpinRite and repair the drive, then copy it to a new drive. Much less expensive than those data recovery services and it is what they'll do as a first attempt anyway.
--- John B.

 

Is your hard drive making clicking/clanking noises or anything like that? if so, you're not in good shape... but otherwise you might be able to get data off of it with software..

I've replaced damaged heads/logic boards from an identical hard drive and recovered data before... it's not too hard as long as you find an identical drive. But hopefully it won't come to that =)

 

Thanks for the info - it's been removed from the computer, after several attempts to transfer/save the data to the new drive using different programs (not sure which ones, that was my computer geek/I mean dad's thing). ha ha - I will try Spinrite and go from there - I knew there were smart people in the hood!

 

It is real stressful to lose pictures, so I'm sure from now on you'll back up religiously, right? =) I recommend a Windows Home Server or perhaps something like Mozy which is ~$5/month for unlimited storage.

 

Got Mozy already