"Advice on catastrophic harddrive crash." Topic

My external Western Digital harddrive failed yesterday. It won't initialize. Micro Center cracked it open and said they couldn't obtain the data. I had everything on that HD that I have ever copied or created on a computer. They say my only option is to try a more extensive retreival for over a $1,000 USD which I cannot afford eeven if I wanted to do it. The HD was about 4 months old. Am I out of luck?

I REALLY would appreciate any feasible options guys.

Thank you,

John

John,

If you search Google with this string; "drive crash retrieval" you will return a number of companies that perfrom this service. I personally can't vouch for any of them, although you might need to spend the day calling around for a good price. Most have an 800 number and 24x7 service. The more relaible the service sadly the more you are going to pay.

Sorry for your pain here.
Donald~

Yeah, I have been quoted over a 1000.00. I simply can't afford it.

John

A grand is pretty much about what I've heard. They actually have to take it into a dust-free room and rebuild it.

My tech guy says that sometimes putting the drive in the freezer overnight will allow you to access it. You might want to check that out too.

Good luck.

A grand is pretty much about what I've heard. They actually have to take it into a dust-free room and rebuild it.

They do what Toshach says and they run the drive at very, very slow speed to pick up what is on it. When mine was done on a 250 gig HD a couple of years ago, it took several days to go through the whole disk.

Success varies. I paid $1700, but only got back 5% of my data. Yup, $1,700 USD for 5%.

It taught me to always back up. I had a huge amount of development code from nearly 15 years worth of coding had neglected to back up on our work server that was lost and had to be rebuilt from scratch.

Good luck John. The freezer thing is worth a try.
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Tim

We had to do the same thing -- my wifes thesis was on a hard drive that crashed. We were lucky -- we sent the drive to the expensive recovery place but they found they didnt have to take the hard drive into the clean room and we got 95% of the data back for $200. USD

Since then I have started using two computers -- one at home and one at the office. I use windows live sync to keep the important data files matched on each PC.

There are also programs out there that do a block by block read of a hard drive. If the problem with the drive is that the directory system is corrupted, these programs can get back a lot of data. I found one that you could use on a trial basis last year. It would scan the disk and report what it could save for free, but you had to pay $70 USD to unlock the program and get data back. Unfortunately I cant remember the program name!!!! But it worked perfectly for a broken PC at the office!

Sometimes the drive motor dies and you can partially open the drive, plug it in, and give the motor's spindle a crank with a pair of needle-nose pliers ("Contact!"). Have something ready that can receive all of the files. The problem mentioned by Nick Bowler or something more catastrophic is more likely since the drive is fairly new. I wouldn't be surprised if WD would replace the media. They used to have a really awesome replacement/upgrade warranty.

At work I've used a couple of programs, R-Studio and Ontrack. This is of course assuming that something is just corrupt on the drive and it still can be "seen" by the computer. If the programs can't see it, then you have to go to a recover service. Your price quote is pretty standard.

Hope this helps, Xin