Has Anyone Here Used a Data Recovery Service?

[Guncrazy]

I've got a Maxtor 300GB external hard drive that's gone bad. And stupidly, I don't have a backup of it.

I don't think software recovery is going to work, so that leaves me looking for a reputable company that will open it up, and hopefully for less than the price of an arm (say, a Springer XD45).

Anyone have any recommendations?

[Dedicated_Dad]

Define "bad"? What does it do?

Is it SATA or PATA?

Open the case, inside you should find a hard-drive just like any other. You MAY find that you can install it inside your system and it will work - maybe it's just the USB/whatever interface that's fried. If it's a small "laptop" drive you can buy an adapter for just a few bucks, or (better yet) get one of those adapters that let you hook any drive to a USB port. (Here's one - it's different from mine but I'd bet inside they're all pretty much alike...)

Next option: Look at the "circuit board" side of the disk. Is it attached to the rest with screws? If so, you may be able to switch it with another "good" one from an IDENTICAL disk - it must be IDENTICAL!!

I've used both these methods to recover data in the past.

It would have to be some seriously important pron for me to pay the costs of one of these "recovery" services. They usually charge by the MB...

"Two is one, one is none"

HTH

DD

/pro-geek

[Ben Rumson]

I know of a place in Reston, VA. A few years ago, it was $150.00 for diagnostics and an estimate with what data could be recovered. I never saw them charge less then $1200.00 and we sent a few drives over to them. Let me know if you want the name and I'll look it up.

[Rumpshot]

Used something like "Data Doctors", not sure of the name in 1995 in San Diego. $500.00 plus for harddisk recovery of a 1 gig or smaller disk drive. I was less than satisfied with the end results, but did manage to recover most of the files. Lots of contracts, and Underground Storage Tank remediation files. My guess is it would be 10 times that amount today for a contemporary larger hard drive.

Backup, Backup, Backup. And be redundantly redundant.

Home files and photos are a shame to lose. Business files on the other hand are critical.

[Erik]

This might be wellknown to people here, but I figured I might as well.
It's basically what DD said.

I had an internal harddrive fail on me some years back, and after checking out some Data Recovery Services, I figured they were much too expensive for me (I believe they started at $1000 and then up).
So I took it to a local store where I know the guys knows what they're doing, and they simply hotswapped it into one of their computers and got maybe 90% of the data out of it that way.
(Then they got me a new bigger hd, installed and done, for less then $200 total, a bargain here at that time)

They told me that if you have a failed hard drive, the easiest way to try and rescue data is to buy a USB cradle for it and hook it up. Often, that's all it takes to get a lot of data out of it. Next step is to try and connect it as a slavedrive into a computer.
And if none of that works, you need to decide if you want to pay for DRS. But you can always try it the easy way first, just in case. It wont hurt.

I've used an USB cradle to access a lot of drives since then.

[HTRN]

Nobody's mentioned the freezer trick? Color me surprised.


HTRN