Topic: Dead Hard Drive

[Poppy Mole]

Boxing Day & my main PC won't boot up gets so far & refuses to acknowledge that there is a hard drive.
Yesterday I phoned my local computer experts who said bring it in & we'll have a look, took it over this morning & got a phone call back late this afternoon to tell me that the hard drive was dead. So a new hard drive & windows 7 (the original was running on XP media which is not easily available now, however my biggest headache is that I never backed anything up consequently I now have to decide whether it is going to be worth spending LOTS of money to a specialist company who will try (no guarantees) to retrieve all my photos etc. etc.
Has anyone else had to go this route or know of anyone who has & is it worth it?

[BarriedaleNick]

I have used a couple of firms in the past both successfully and not.  The good thing is that you shouldnt pay if they dont get the data back.  I dont have the detils of the companies here but I do know that it aint cheap. Depending on volume of data of course but we did pay over £300 for one drive..
Ill see if I can get the company details if you want..
Is it worth it - depends on how much you value your data - for the guy whose daughters A level coursework was on his drive then it was!

[hippydave]

my stepson works for techguys and has a lot of data recovery software, he has just done a drive that was submerged in dirty water for 3 days and he managed to get everything off it. If you want to send it up to me ill get him to see if anything if anything is recoverable from it and if so put it on dvd for you, but cannot guarantee if anything is recoverable depending on the fault. And it wont cost you £300 :)

[Poppy Mole]

Thanks, would appreciate contacts,although the chap I spoke to today said he would give me some contacts as well

[Palustris]

Happened to us and I  bought a thing called an ICY Box. You remove the old hard drive from the computer and fit it in to the box (dead easy, must be I did it) and then I downloaded a program from the Internet (Freeware) which allowed me recover all but a few bits from the old drive. Obviously this only works if the drive is not physically damaged so badly that nothing may be got from it. The one we got was about £18 and the company I contacted for recovery wanted £25 just to look at the drive and pro rata for any work done on it.
Will go looking for the program if you are interested, but from memory it is one of the GUM suite of programs.

[Bugloss2009]

i managed to recover all the data from a dead hard drive but taking it out and connecting it up as a secondary hard drive in another working pc.

of course my drive might not have been as dead as yours, but as far as the original pc was concerned it was as dead as a Dodo

worth a try and costs nothing

[Palustris]

Don't know where Gum came from, meant Gnu. Anyway this is the program I used
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

[Larkshall]

Thanks for that Palustris, I've downloaded it. It will be a useful addition to my library and may come in useful for our Computer User Group. I shall also bookmark the site for future downloads of any type OS.

Happy New Year to all.

[rosebud]

 Yesterday i was in PC world,  hubby bought me new puter ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D.

Anyway while i was waiting at the cash desk, i saw on the wall there that they can recover lost data for £99.99!!! they are called techguys.  Any help??

[Poppy Mole]

Thanks  to everyone, the guys I took it to don't hold out much hope of any recovery but I have sent it to a company they recommended (no data - no fee & reasonable cost if they do), however because of the new year holidays I shan't hear until at least the end of the week. Meanwhile I have a nice new hard drive on which I have been persuaded to have windows 7 installed, but am reluctant to start to re-do anything just in case it is recoverable.

[dtw]

Why not try and get hold of an identical drive on ebay and swap over the electronics on the outside of the drive.
The internal workings are pretty unlikely to be damaged unless they have been dropped.

[Poppy Mole]

That sounds a bit technical