At our fire station the computer crashed (with the hardrive malfunctioning). We have “print copies” of most of the stuff, but the Chief had not been backing up the data (something that will change with the new system that will feature a DVD write capability). However, there are thousands of pages of “hard data” from the last six years that will have to be manually entered (my wife has volunteered to help). The chief (who is also deputy prosecutor) said that he even tried a program they use to find child porn stuff and it didn’t help.
Can someone out there make me a hero and or spare my wife hundreds of hours of retyping all that data? Are there any relatively low cost approaches (under say $2,000 or so) that could recover that data? I don’t know the exact nature of the malfunction only that it involved the hardrive itself, I could probably find out (it was a relatively old Pentium II or III system that had been donated by one of the volunteer fire fighters)
Depends on how it breaks, and how much you’re willing to spend. There are data recovery services which can do what you want, but they tend to be expensive. Sometimes, it’s possible to simply replace the failed drive interface electronics, then you can simply reinstall the drive normally. If the drive has failed internally, **i.e.*, the head fails or the voice coil burns out, then the drive can be opened under cleanroom conditions, the platters removed, and reinstalled in a new drive shell to access the data. Data can almost always be recovered, it’s just a matter of cost.
A person in our organization ignored our policy that all work-related data must be stored on the network, and when her hard drive died we had to send it off for recovery (her boss was influential). It cost $800, but we got everything back.
Yup. These guys can work wonders. Unfortunately, the drive has been messed about after the problem manifested, which may significantly impact recoverability.
Data recovery services are amazing. They can pull data off just about anything so long as it’s not physically damaged, and sometimes even when it is. Check out the DriveSavers Museum of Disk-Asters for some prime examples.
When you have a “hard drive crash,” usually the platters themselves are peachy-keen and just fine. The physical problem, if there is one, tends to be something along the lines of the mechanism refusing to spin or the heads being stuck and unable to move along the surface of the disk. These tend to be the easiest of the hardware problems for a data recovery service to over come (difficult ones would be like, “I ran my hard drive through the dishwasher!”) Basically, they’ll take the drive into a clean room, crack it open, and use another mechanism to read the data right off the drive’s platters.
Price will depend on turnaround time and how you want your data delivered back to you. The most expensive recovery I ever had a part of was close to $2K, but that was for one-day express service. Call up some companies and ask for prices.
I once worked on a computer that wouldn’t come up after I was done – the hard drive refused to spin at all. It wasn’t my fault, but it still fell to me to fix it-- and the disk had the VP of HR’s only copy of her presentation to the board of directors, which she was giving the next morning. So I got to drive up to the city to take the disk to a data recovery place. They charged about $400, as I remember, for same-day service and a new hard drive to put the data on. Ended up being a very nice day out of the office for me, with an expensed lunch and everything. I highly recommend the experience.