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Data recovery services?

S

spinjector

Can anyone suggest a reliable & economical data recovery service? I did a Google search and a bunch came up, but I don't know which ones to start getting prices from.

I have a jock here with a portable USB hard drive that went bad, and he's doing backflips because it's only six months old and there are important files on it.

I trust this guy enough that when he says he didn't drop it or abuse it, so I think it's just an electronic failure.
 
I had an external hard drive fail and I took it down to Best Buy Geek Squad. They have a cheap (about $60) entry-level recovery service. If they can't fix it, they can send it off to their "high-level" repair center. Plus, it's Best Buy, so you know they are reputable and have a local location in case you have any problems.

Note: My hard drive eventually needed a Level 2 repair that cost me almost $400. Painful, but worth it.
 
No kidding? Best Buy? Wow.

I'm a whiz with crashed file systems, but this is an electronic failure in the drive. The spindle motor won't spin up.
 
Mine was a portable external USB hard drive too. I tried pulling the hard drive out of it's enclosure and connecting it to my desktop computer. Then, I ran a bunch of recovery programs on it to try to recover the data myself. When I finally gave up, I took it to the "electronics experts" at BEST BUY. :D

Since the low level recovery didn't work, they didn't charge me for it. But, like I said, the level 2 recovery hurt a little.
 
Does level 2 repair involve a new control board on the drive, and/or placing the disk itself
into another (known good) case? If that's so, I have one waiting for such a job.
First look by a MacIntosh expert said it appeared the drive had been overwritten with a pattern, as
if to reformat the disk. I think the data is still there, but the electronics are hosed.
 
Anyone who has their only copy of irreplaceable files on a USB thumb drive need more than a data recovery service, they need their head examined for excessive empty space. They can fail due to static charges and really no one has any idea how many times they can be written to and rewritten before they fail. I did once have an expert tell me that completely reformatting them to erase the data contributes to an early demise but he had no idea how long they should last anyway.
 
According to the folks at Best Buy, a level 1 repair is using software (similar to SpinRite) to restore the drive or recover the data.

A level 2 recovery is not done in-house, but they send it to their preferred repair facility. The repair facility will fire up the drive and pull the raw data (0101010101) off the drive and reconstruct it into useable files. This is what happened to me, the file allocation table disappeared and could not be restored. Windows recognized that the drive had 80g of space used, but showed no files. They copy the recovered files onto an external drive and ship it back to you. Price varies with the amount of data to be recovered (about $400-$600). Turn around time was about 2 weeks.

A level 3 recovery (which sounds like what you might need :( ) involves opening the drive itself and transferring the drive disks to another drive and recovering the files. I would bet this could creep into the $1000 range, because it involves a clean room and a high level tech to do the work. If you think you'll need a level 3 repair, I would seriously shop around. Prices may vary by hundreds of dollars.

But first and foremost, I would try removing the drive from the USB enclosure and put it in a desktop computer.
 
There are very few people who can properly do a Level 3 repair, and the cost is typically $1400+, depending the what's required and how much data's involved. On-Track is the vendor of choice for most manufacturers.

Since the drive is less than 6 months old, I'd contact the manufacturer first. There have been some drives with electronics or BIOS issues lately, particularly from Seagate. Even swapping the controller board won't resolve the issue, but Seagate has been able to resolve the issue and recover data on drives under warranty, at no charge. I'm not saying that's the case here, but it's certainly worth exploring the possibility with the manufacturer.
 
In my case ( actually my wife's ) a MacIntosh big-screen with all the guts behind the screen went belly-up
after a year. I put in a new hard drive and reloaded the OS, and need to decide if the photos are worth
the effort and money. I think it was a Seagate drive, though. I should check.
Annoying thing is I had installed a network-shared hard drive to back up such files, but did not automate that task.
 
Tom Wells said:
In my case ( actually my wife's ) a MacIntosh big-screen with all the guts behind the screen went belly-up
after a year. I put in a new hard drive and reloaded the OS, and need to decide if the photos are worth
the effort and money. I think it was a Seagate drive, though. I should check.
Annoying thing is I had installed a network-shared hard drive to back up such files, but did not automate that task.
Click to expand...

Should we assume that your wife will remind you to automate that task on the new hard drive?
 
We have backups and backups for our backups, plus I use Carbonite on my office computer. There's nothing worse than losing critical files and programs. And USB thumb drives should be used for convenience, not for storing critical information. Oh... and don't leave one in your pocket when doing the washing.
 
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