Shopping for data recovery.

i have a hard drive with what is likely a crashed head. i talked to someone who was very transparent about his data recovery business, he agreed that it probably needs hardware repair, and further recovery attempts in it's current state might cause more data loss.

he told me that any company who offers cheap flat fee recovery simply won't do hardware repairs, or will raise the cost if they do. for a rough quote he gave me 500-1500

anyone want to talk about their experiences? also, i know there are forums specific to this, but does anyone know a little bit about it? i'm kind of curious if like, maybe one of the platters is too far gone anyway, and the rest of them aren't gonna get damaged any more if i try to spin it up and use recovery software?

after it happened, windows saw most of the folders for a few minutes. after plugging it in a few more times tho, it hangs and doesn't pull up autoplay or anything... all the sadsssss

 

Same experience, third hand (from customer story).

Quoted very low for initial fee. Was finally charged $500 for a 'new' 160GB HDD with recovered data and an additional $1800 for parts to repair the original drive (not returned). Total? $2600 and that didn't even include all the data on the drive (no one guarantees 100% recovery service).

What you're expecting to happen, won't. A single platter isn't the issue. The head assembly is (and associated circuitry). Keep powering it up at your own risk.

Decide if the one time $$$$ for even some/partial recovery is worth the 'forever' loss of all that data.

Unfortunately, it is times like this when multiple backups (and their cost) make sense for most.

 

Few years ago, we had the hard drive of our company server crashed. The back-ups were more than a month old. We had to send it to a some company in India for recovery and they charged based on number of files recovered. It was a substantial amount in the end.

On the other hand one of my friends was able to recover the data from his HDD by himself by opening it and resetting the actuator arm to landing tray.

It all depends how valuable your data is.