Fields Data Recovery / Rapid Data Recovery

DSpoon

Unfortunately I fell for the scam from Rapid data, wish I googled the reviews before sending off my external drive, but I was desperate to get my data back and they seemed so friendly on the phone.

Sent off my drive, was told the most expensive repair would be £300, which I thought ok as I had 190gb on my drive. Then they get back to me, quoting serious issues with my drive and the price would now be £425+ vat+delivery to recover 80gb of files. They emailed me the file list in an attachment, but none of those showed the size. When I told them I would think about it and call them back, the pressure started saying that they are really busy, can only keep my files on their servers for a day so I need to make a decision. They also reduced the price to £320+vat plus delivery, all ended up costing about £390. I paid, then after about an hour I got cold feet and called them to cancel. Was told the work has already started and could not be stopped. Whatever. They promised to deliver in three days and so far so good - the package arrived when they said it would.

What I got was an internal hard drive for which I had to go out and buy and enclosure costing £30, in order to connect the drive to my computer. I was told once I return their drive, mine would be sent back..... yeah right.

First - the so called recovered files - loads of them were just empty folders with nothing in them. Then loads of the files that had something in them had some unreadable unix files that I could not access. I deal with high-res photography and needed some of the images that were not backed up on discs, so imagine my horror when loads of those photographs were "recovered" as a negative? Many high res photos size 100mb each are in the form of negative and unreadable!

Tried calling and emailing, got one email back that customer services would be contacting me regarding my concern. Fat chance, heard nothing! In the end I gave up, sent back their drive so at least I could get my own drive back to give it to someone who could actually do the job, but so far no drive and no word from Rapid data. My drive cost me £200 so I could do with it back to have it repaired.

Luckily paid by cc so called them so they froze the amount pending the investigation. Now I just have to prove somehow that the data I got was not what I was told I'd get.
So yes, another unhappy customer.

Hammyman

totalsolutions wrote: »

For fear of repeating myself, as you are new here, good luck. Try https://www.grc.com. Harddrive repair and recovery software. Does not touch your data but renews the drive platter magnetic properties so the surface is "refreshed and renewed" so can be read correctly again. The product was created by Steve Gibson and is called Spinrite. It does what it says on the tin. As used by US military.

BWAHAHAHAHA. You are aware that Steve Gibson is a joke in the IT community and merely sells snake oil?

I'd love to know how "renews the drive platter magnetic properties so the surface is "refreshed and renewed" so can be read correctly again" works, especially considering your data is stored as an electrical charge on the hard drive platter so any altering of any magnetic properties will corrupt it.

And if the drive motor is dead or the controller board is dead, no amount of magical platter renewing will fix that.


I use Retrodata. They're an actual proper hard drive data recovery firm. They charge around £500 for 20GB. Anyone charging much less than that is running software anyone can buy and hoping and praying.

dragon934

spinrite can work if data is corrupted or something happens on the "soft" side of life.
Any real Hardware problems and it will likely make things worse. Spinrite is a glorified CHKDSK that doesn't give up as easy, which although it has helped me ocassionally (as has HDD Regenerator) if you have dropped your HDD and suspect damage from any kind of shock all you will get is a lovely silver ring around your mirror finish HDD platter.
Think record (vinyl) and needle. Now spin said vinyl at 7200 RPM and push the needle into the vinyl. What you'd get is a "Head Crash" which is as friendly as much as it sounds!

End of the day, if you can't afford data recovery, and your gonna throw it out, at least try cooling it right down (below zero) and use cloning software to see what you get, then throw away the bad one. Then fix your new one (it will copy the bad sectors even though they are no longer "real") Works only for failing drives in some cases and has worked 5 times out of 11 or 12 drives, where the user just wanted me "to do my best on the cheap" not recommended for your prized family photos where a backup is by far the best method of recovery, but then everyone learns that the hard way sadly

mr_fishbulb

Hammyman wrote: »

BWAHAHAHAHA. You are aware that Steve Gibson is a joke in the IT community and merely sells snake oil?

I've actually had a couple of successes with Spinright when I was working in IT support. Although I did try it on about 20 machines so that's only 10%.

Hammyman

mr_fishbulb wrote: »

I've actually had a couple of successes with Spinright when I was working in IT support. Although I did try it on about 20 machines so that's only 10%.

TBH, you'd have about the same success using CGSecurities "Testdisk" which is free. Something I try for quick software recovery is booting off a Ubuntu Live CD. It won't time-out as quick as Windows and I managed to recover several GB of data off a laptop that had been thrown across a room and whose hard drive actually made loud screeching and clunking noises, the impact had been that severe.

angrysmurf

Hammyman wrote: »

TBH, you'd have about the same success using CGSecurities "Testdisk" which is free. Something I try for quick software recovery is booting off a Ubuntu Live CD. It won't time-out as quick as Windows and I managed to recover several GB of data off a laptop that had been thrown across a room and whose hard drive actually made loud screeching and clunking noises, the impact had been that severe.

This is all a little over my head since I am not familiar with DR technologies but you make a good point about the cost of data recovery, if a hard drive is damaged it wont be cheap to repair with proper tools and expertise. There is no fixed "no data, no fee" £247 or £97 cost for a job which can only be accurately priced once the HDD is examined.

The Field of Data Recovery will soon come under scrutiny when the ASA's new guidelines about exaggerated or misleading claims made on websites comes into force.

I have a question about Spinrite and damage to hard drives - please excuse me if I bring things back to the focus of the thread. Fields - or lets just say a hypothetical phoenix data recovery company so we don't all get sued - tend to damage a large number of their drives due to the method they use, the independent examinations of my hard drive showed that the platters had been removed and the official report I received said that my "head disk assembly" needed to be replaced.

I was told by one tech that an image of a drive should be made before putting a drive on a data extractor (is that what Spinrite is?) and then extraction is performed on the image, not the drive.

Lets say that a company damaged lots of drives in addition to not recovering the data, claimed that they had to replace the HDA in their template reports, is this likely to be the method they are using and would any professional company use this technique?

Thanks in advance to all genuine DR Gurus :T

fwor

I should start by saying that I'm definitely not a DR Guru, and people who work on HDDs on a daily basis would be better qualified to comment, but...

My own personal experience of dismantling modern HDD's is that they are not designed to be dismantled and re-assembled. Most fundamentally, it would be almost impossible to do in such a way that you did not introduce so much dust contamination that, when powered up, would immediately destroy the heads and make data recovery impossible.

And, at a practical level, the ones I've worked on used fixings internally that are not intended to be removable (i.e. components are riveted or bonded in place).

Further, a proper DR would not rely on just one technique, because a HDD can fail in a number of ways - the recovery technique for failed controller circuitry would be entirely different from a failure of the internal components that move the heads. I suspect your hypothetical DR company does this because - once done - it can't be undone, and there is no way of subsequently proving how the drive actually failed.

sharkie

Hammyman wrote: »

BWAHAHAHAHA. You are aware that Steve Gibson is a joke in the IT community and merely sells snake oil?

I'd love to know how "renews the drive platter magnetic properties so the surface is "refreshed and renewed" so can be read correctly again" works, especially considering your data is stored as an electrical charge on the hard drive platter so any altering of any magnetic properties will corrupt it.

And if the drive motor is dead or the controller board is dead, no amount of magical platter renewing will fix that.

+1

Sprinrite is a bit like Turd Polish. Although you can't polish a turd, you can cover it in glitter. Spinrite is the hdd version of glitter!

Spinrite does 'fix' bad sectors, but why would you want to un-mark bad sectors then call them 'fixed'? Yes, the bad sectors may work for a while, but they were marked as bad for a reason.

---

angrysmurf have look on youtube how people recover disks. Some companies do not have clean rooms, but clean boxes.

I have never been involved in the hardware recovery of disks, but do know platter removal is best avoided, especially if there is more than one plater as positioning of data gets messed up. Special tools are used to remove multiple platters so that each platter is kept in exact alignment with the others platters.

the easiest way is to get the drive to read the disk, and if the disk can not be read in the normal direction form start of sector 0 track0, then it is read backwards from bottom of last sector on the last track to beginning (or error)

for big buck recovery (data overwritten or wiped) the platters are read via the heads and inputted into an analogue device and the output waveforms levels are interpreted.

Instigate

Hello one and all,

I had mistakenly used the internet as a fast way to look for a data recovery service when my HDD went down - so I thought I was doing myself a favour Google searching companies and systematically calling them with my circumstances to find the best deal.

Of course I arrived upon FIELDS DATA RECOVERY and was really impressed by their website, advertising and array of previous clients. I have visited the Hammersmith office for collection and awaited their diagnosis report. Money has not exchanged hands yet, but I am receiving misleading information about the location of the drive. I would normally have done a background check, but the distress of losing up to 1TB of data has been overwhelming.

What I would now like to know is: whether it is possible to retrieve the HDD from a company like FIELDS DATA RECOVERY at no extra cost WITHOUT asking for the data recovery service at all. I know this is a shot in the dark and I could be receiving an HDD without casing, but the scary stories that I have seen so far indicate that there is NO data recovery taking place at all.

If there are any previous customers who can advise me I would be eternally grateful and I will also let you know how I get on - as far as possible - while I explore other channels.

Kind regards





Trevor

rcoull

I am a genuine customer of Fields, having sent them my dead hard drive on Monday of this week.

They recovered 95% of my data by Wednesday, uploading 20Gb of my data to an FTP site for me to download, and today (Friday) I have received 10 DVDs from them by DHL containing all the data that they told me they could recover - a massive 39Gb, and 95% of all the files that had been on my hard drive.

I honestly couldnt be more pleased with their service, and dont understand why so many reviews saying they are a scam.

I read these forums on Tuesday after I had already shipped my drive, and I was so nervous about continuing with them, and was highly tempted to tell them to ship my hard drive straight back again, but I really cant fault their service at all.