Busted External Hard Drive

Andy77

Andy77

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Ok guys well my external hard drive gave up the ghost a few weeks ago, ive sent it off to a company for the data to be recovered but there quoting me £195 for the parts it needs for the recovery and then another £195 for the recovery of the data, i do need it doing as there are around 7500 photos on it, the company im using rapid data recovery london based, i just wondered if anyone has ever had the same problem and if there are any other companys worth trying before i splash the cash.

Thanks Andy
 
neil_g said:
I take it you tried taking the drive out of the enclosure and putting it in a pc? Most common hard drive fault is a dodgy enclosure,
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Apparently the head is broken on the hard drive, ive tried putting the drive into my pc with no luck, the hard drive just makes a clicking noise

Andy
 
What parts? I assume they're talking about another HD... that said a total of £390 for the recovery isn't way out of line for other recoveries I've seen (although they were recovered to an FTP server that you could login to and download the content rather than another drive... ie. source your own replacement).

Look at it another way 5p a picture.

Now is the time to learn the 3 rules of backups (Back it up. Back it up (again). Back it up (again somewhere else)). My SWMBO went nuts when I bought 3 external drives (2 manufacturers*) - but then her brother lost the whole lot of his family shots in a "single" backup failure episode.

* I say this because I've been "lucky enough" to suffer Seagate's "revolutionary new drive lubricant" (to enable smaller motors but turned to glue just after warranty ran out - result drive didn't spin up, so motor burned out) and IBM's DeathStar range - that basically went clunk after an unspecified period. So I'd never trust a single vendor solution again.
 
I don't know anything about this company other than that they used to have a good reputation with one of the hardware newsgroups I used to read. They used to buy obscure old hard drives so they could cannibalise them for their recovery work and hence used to talk about the work they did and attract customers too.

http://www.retrodata.co.uk/
 
@hunnymonster - the 'parts' you need for recovery are an identical drive in order to be able to read the platters correctly.

I'm interested in this also as I have a dead drive with some photos on it. Fortunately I've an identical drive which works so if its a case of them dropping the platters into the working mechanism then it should save me a few hundred quid.

I've just done a quick google and £200 seems to be about the starting point for recovery.
 
Andy77 said:
Ok guys well my external hard drive gave up the ghost a few weeks ago, ive sent it off to a company for the data to be recovered but there quoting me £195 for the parts it needs for the recovery and then another £195 for the recovery of the data, i do need it doing as there are around 7500 photos on it, the company im using rapid data recovery london based, i just wondered if anyone has ever had the same problem and if there are any other companys worth trying before i splash the cash.

Thanks Andy
Click to expand...

The question you should ask yourself I suppose is how much are these 7.5K pics worth to you and go from there. If you can't find anyone to retreive them within their worth than forget about them.
 
That is a very good price.

I sent a drive off for recovery and was quoted about £1,500.

Just pay the money and make sure you have 2 identical drives in future - this could have been a lot worse!

Also, have they guaranteed you the data back? Most give a % chance of getting X amount back. Worth checking before you stump up.
 
BarryG said:
That is a very good price.

I sent a drive off for recovery and was quoted about £1,500.

Just pay the money and make sure you have 2 identical drives in future - this could have been a lot worse!

Also, have they guaranteed you the data back? Most give a % chance of getting X amount back. Worth checking before you stump up.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the replys guys, they have guaranteed 89% data recovery

Andy
 
^ It depends what is wrong with the HDD.

If one of the platters is damaged, you're in trouble. If it's just the arm and the platters are ok, then you'll got most if not all back.
 
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