Hard Disk Recovery

boso

I was wondering if anyone knew of a place I can get hard disk receovery done cheaply?

My Dell PC has just died, and the hard disks were configured as a RAID 0 array, so I can't just connect them into a new PC and copy the data over.

I've got a few quotes for recovery, but I'm getting some crazy prices (all over £500).

If anyone knows where I can do this for less, I'd be grateful.

basmic

I'm not sure if this would work or not, but maybe buying a RAID controller card (about £25) would allow you to access the RAID volume again?

Duk

Personally I have never had to recover a raid-0 disk. I would just look around google im sure you will find one for less. I have however been told that these are good.

http://www.datarecoverydirect.co.uk

But generally most people have RAID-10 now for Striping and Mirroring. so at least you have some redundancy if one of your disks die.

boso

mmm, I didn't actually think of that. Might give it a go.

Do you connect the drives to the controller card?

[Deleted User]

Have a look at:

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=1626309&highlight=recovery+company
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=1348739&highlight=recovery+company
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=1304351&highlight=recovery+company
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=1290185&highlight=recovery+company

clickclash

boso wrote: »

I've got a few quotes for recovery, but I'm getting some crazy prices (all over £500).

If anyone knows where I can do this for less, I'd be grateful.

Sounds about right, professional HDD recovery is a time consuming and costly feature that is very rarely worth it. Its there ideally for when business or institutes lost irreplaceable data, not for personal recovery.

boso

The disks are not dead, I just can't read them.

I'm going to try the RAID controller card to see if I can get the data off, that would be great, I just hope it can read an existing RAID array !!

I've got ALL my digital photos on the drive, including all my daughter's baby pictures, wedding pictures, and pics from my dad's 60th birthday, so I'd be gutted if I've lost that.

[Deleted User]

Most decent motherboards will have Raid controllers on them already that can handle 0,1,10 so if you can borrow someone's computer for a short while, you can still access the files.

When you say the Dell has 'died', how do you mean? What's wrong with it?

boso

The PC is not coming on, and is flashing a yellow amber light on the power button.

I've done some research online, and found that it's due to the PC not being able to send power to a device (I'm praying it's not the hard drive)

I had someone look at it, and he couldn't figure it out.

I'm toying with the idea of calling Dell's out of warranty support line, but if I can get my data off, I might just call it quits and get a new PC.

[Deleted User]

Have you checked that all of the cables are seated correctly, then if they are, removing devices one by one to see if anything changes? I wouldn't expect a failure on a hard drive to prevent POST.

totalsolutions

Please do not do this - use Raid 0

RAID 0 (striped disks) distributes data across several disks in a way that gives improved speed and no lost capacity, but all data on all disks will be lost if any one disk fails. Although such an array has no actual redundancy, it is customary to call it RAID 0.