Hello,
My cousin has may have a hard drive that can’t be read from. Most likely they’ll just have someone hook up the drive to another system and transfer the data, but the worst case scenario is that it will have to be sent out. I know that there are companies that specialize in recovering data from damaged hard drives, but don’t know which ones are good.
Does anyone here have any experience with these companies? How long did they take and how much did they charge?
Thanks in advance.
I used to do this job myself, long long ago in the early days of hard drives for personal computers, something around 1980. I even did “white room” repairs on hard drives. But I haven’t done this sort of job for ages. It can be a bitch to recover the data, depending on how bad the damage is (and oh could I tell you stories). Data recovery is usually fairly expensive, usually costing more to recover the drive than the drive cost.
My ISP recently got zapped with a huge power surge and lost their entire array of webserver hard drives, about 10 machines as I understand it. They raved about a company in San Francisco that recovered all their data even though the drives electronics were totally fried. As I understand it, they can actually remount the platters in a new mechanism and get the data off. If it comes to it, I could ask the name of the company they use, as I have long since forgotten it.
Also check out http://www.drivesavers.com
-Ben
If’s it’s the drive interface electronics (ie the integrated controller board on standard IDE drives) and not the media, which is usually indicated by sudden death vs media failures which are usually progressive over time, it might be considerably less expensive than the hundreds to thousands sent on recovery service to simply get another identical drive and swap the controller board. Newgroups are good for this sort of thing and possibly Ebay.