It looks like the hard drive in my wife's laptop has taken a sh*t That wouldn't be such a big deal if she'd been better about backing up her data. We're looking at losing a significant amount of data, pictures, etc (including honeymoon photos). There are a ton of hard drive recover services online, but does anyone have any experience with any of them? What is available and what kind of cost might I be looking at?
You're looking at a big chunk of money. Most services I've seen cost around $1000. It depends on whats wrong with the hard drive too. If its a mechanical failure, then yes its going to cost quite a chunk. I was once able to recover a mechanically failed hard drive by buying an identical hard drive off ebay, and then replacing the logic/controller board on the back. Its only held on by a couple screws, you'll need a torx size 8 head to unscrew them. Just pop the old one off and pop the new one back on. Hopefully its nothing mechanically wrong with something on the inside, like the read/write head(s). If replacing the logic board doesn't work, I wouldn't recommend taking the hard drive apart. As soon as the platters are exposed to anything like dust it can compromise the entire disk, then you're really screwed. You're better off at that point shipping it to a professional. EDIT: Crap, I just reread your description and realized it was a laptop hard drive. Not much I can help you with there unfortunately
Now is the moment you have to decide how valuable the information on that drive is to you. Of course a 100 dollar USB drive and a batch file would have saved you a lot of grief and expense but we'll call that a lession learned. Now how did the drive fail..? Was the machine running, followed by some mechanical clicking and then it shut off or crashed or will it just not boot the OS. Those are very different failures. If clicking noises were heard then stop trying to boot the disk and leave it powered off. That is a mechanical failure of the drive head mechanism and any further spinning of the platters could render them useless. In this situation the only solution is to send of to a drive recovery comapny so thay can pull the platters and drop them into another drive and recover as much of the data as they can. If the drive simply will not boot into the OS this could be as simple as error in the boot sector, bad index or file allocation table or the drive has suffered and electronic control failure of the circuit board. In this case dropping it into a USB enclosure could be all you need to do to get some data back. If it's an electronics failure on the board then the best bet is for it to take a trip to a data recovery facility as well. You could find an identical drive with the same firmware on the board and swap them but that's risky as the layout maybe different.
It started with a failure to load OS. There were some clicking noises, faint, but clicking. Now there is nothing at all. No whirring, no clicking, just silence.
I've heard you can put it in the freezer and get it real cold, then throw it in the machine and have it work long enough to get some stuff off of it. Mechancial tolerances and stuff.
Rhiannon had a recovery on one of her HDs done for about $200 Needless to say, she backs everything up now.
Yeah, I heard if you jump up and down on it and then start it on fire, 76.2% of the time you'll get all your info back.
I just picked up a new SATA SSD* drive for my laptop from NewEgg.com, and got a nice external enclosure for about $12. They also threw in a free 4GB flash drive. *SSD drives are not for everybody. I needed the low power requirements and the toughness more than giant capacity. NewEgg.com has lots of non-SSD SATA drives for really cheap. I installed the new drive in my machine, put the old drive in my new enclosure, used Acronis True Image software to clone the old drive to the new one. The new drive has to be IN the laptop to be cloned properly. If the boot sector of your old drive is the source of the trouble, this will bypass that problem and allow you to save all your stuff. I had a malware bug ('Antivirus Soft' for the geeks amog ya) and was able to remove all traces of it that way. The new setup is a helluv alot faster than the old drive, and my total outlay was about $200. I had a HD failure about five years ago, and th eprices I was quoted ranged from 250 to over $1000 to recover the data. A friend who works in Philadelphia's Chinatown took it in to some little hole-in-the wall place down there, and they recovered ALL my data off the HD for $50 cash plus the cost of a couple flash drives which were more $ back then. and did it during lunch hour. Since I never store passwords on my machine, I was not worried about that stuff. I also have a 1TB USB drive that I back all my "important" files to. I don't ever save a single post from the WERA bbs.
Buy a USB adapter and plug it into a newer machine. I had the same thing happen on my thinkpad drive. By the sounds it made, it sounded like the HD was bad. Clicking and wierd sounds. Plugged it into my work computer and was able to retrieve all the data.
In the middle of that my self. Blue screen on laptop and installed new HD and reload windows. Just purchased USB to SATA cable to try a recover the data. So far it sees the HD but can't pull the data. Currently have the HD in the freezer to try that trick. Fun Stuff!! Todd
Yup I took my Mgr.'s laptop there. Cost us just over $1000 but there were mounds of confidential and other important info so we had no choice. He had to have a shop communicate with a shop in Japan to find a HD to work with his Japanese version Vaio. Took weeks before it was shipped and he could bring to Cherry Systems to paint everything onto the new one. WAPITA I just call Mr. Yamaha Rick!
i used a program once to recover a bad drive, it rebuilt about 95% of all the files, occasionally i might hit a eps file that is corrupt or something and a mp3 that isnt what its named and its already into the song when it starts, but it worked really good, my drive just vanished one day, it was my spare drive and it was all just files of stuff, i backed up most of my stuff on dvd
I got a good suggestion . . . . try a live cd distro of Linux It boots the OS from cd-rom drive and puts less stress on the hard drive itself I have been able to recover some data off of couple bad hard drives this way . . . . . i also had the machine connected to network so i could send the data to another machine right away. I suggest trying something such as puppy linux. regardless best luck with everything i am computer network admin and know how much of *#*#* that can be
little bit of confusion on this I ahve a older Levono (IBM) laptop. It is a pretty good machine espically since it is maxed out at 512 ram. Great for web surfing. So in the past I had an issue wiht the drive clicking some and then B.S.D. would show up. I then reboot and would operate fine. Now it will not even fully boot up. I would like to get it going to use as a simple surfing machine for my step son. I went to Newegg.com and they have a 80 gig HD for $40. I think that this would work but not sure how to go about getting this machine to boot up. Do not know if I need to install windows on the second HD or what. Can some one give me a play by play on getting this thing started up. chris
ryoung, I had the same issue about a year ago. I took it to a local mom-and-pop computer store that had been around for years, and they recovered my files and placed it on a 300G USB drive for $150. Before I did this I tried a bunch of other options that got me nowhere.
+1 . I've been in the same sad state -- had a friend use Linux to retrieve 95% of the files of a HDD that had all the symptoms of DOA. Good luck - and never give up.
