Anyone have experience with any of the hard drive recovery companies? A family friend has all of her pictures on a hard drive that has stopped working. Just making a clicking noise. Who is the best and affordable company to try to help?
Anyone have experience with any of the hard drive recovery companies? A family friend has all of her pictures on a hard drive that has stopped working. Just making a clicking noise. Who is the best and affordable company to try to help?
Ouch....the clicking noise is not a good thing. Generally means the step motor is fried and the only way to recover would be a company with a clean room removing the plates and recovering the data. As you can imagine this is VERY expensive. There is a slight chance with the right imaging equipment it can be done but no likely.
As for companies, there are not a lot of them. I personally have no experience with any of them. As a cyber forensic analyst I do it myself or recover from backup.
Is it a desk top computer? If so, you can remove the hd and put it in another computer, put the jumper on the back to slave. Boot the computer up then go in and see if the old hd shows up. If it does, you can see if the photos are on it and copy them to the new hd.
About 10+ years ago my hard drive fried. It had a lot of pics of my son and I on fishing and camping trips and our trip to NYC. I looked into what you're asking about. I found a company out on Northwest Expressway that had the clean room and could "potentially" recover the data but no guarantees or promises for $600. I decided against it.
Don't worry Ma'am....
I'm only here for the Bass.
Problem is with the clicking noise the step motor is bad, even as a slave drive the step motor still has to function for the drive to work. This setup works if the drive no longer boots the computer since as a slave drive it does not need to do so.Originally Posted by Chris M
600 is not to bad, last time I checked they wanted to quote several thousand.
I've done the freezer trick, put it in the freezer overnight, plug it in and hope it gives you enough time to recover the data before it crashes.
I've also bought a second drive identical to it, same model/revisions, then swap out the board on the bottom.
Lastly data recovery, just depends on how much and conditions of the platters, I've heard good things about these guys... http://carolinadatarecovery.com/
A buddy of mine learned a hard lesson when his computer crashed a few years ago with all of his home movies of his kids, wedding, etc. all on his hard drive and no backup. He ended up paying almost $2500 to have a company recover the data which took almost 2 months. They were able to recover the data from the badly damaged hard drive so if you aren't able to get any other help, send me a PM and I'll get in touch with my friend for a referral... although it may take a bit.
Be sure to refer your friend to Google Photo's to start saving all of her pics to the cloud. I have about 20 gb of photos and movies backed up, no charge and can access them from any phone or computer by simply logging in to my Gmail account. At the very least, make sure she buys an external hard drive to backup her system once in a while.
I guess Last Resort is the freezer trick since I've tried everything else. Cheapest quote so far is 1100 with no guarantees.
I have all of my stuff backed up on OneDrive. I think she now has backups of her new stuff as well
That was 10+ years ago too.
Don't worry Ma'am....
I'm only here for the Bass.
last time I checked it was very expensive, but that's been some time ago.
USB hard drives are cheap buy one and back up to it.
It will still click of the boot sector is not able to be found as well.
On track gives free quotes
Funny how this just came up, I had my HD stop working a few weeks ago and have been wondering if it could be recovered. Lost lots of videos and pics on that damn thing. It was a dell computer less than 5 years old. I plan to back up all
my pics and photos to an SD card from now on.
think the last time we used ontrack, it was about 1000, but was worth it to my client.
clicking drive, if you want the data, they are one of the very best.
"It's even, but it ain't settled. Let's settle it." Fast Eddie
I still can't believe they actually won...Cubs Fans Everywhere
I've never used them, but know a few who has with good results. Prices, can't remember exactly, but very good. They also do a free evaluation.
https://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/
Sometime tapping the HD will make it start working again. This will most likely work just long enough to get pictures.
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