Hard Drive Data Recovery Specialists

richdeniro

On Friday my hard drive corrupted and despite my best efforts over the weekend I haven't been able to recover anything - The main thing that I want to recover is my photos, e-mails and a few documents.

I am going to send my hard drive to these guys to see what they can do...

http://www.drdus.com/

Just wondering if anyone else has dealt with this sort of company and what my chances were of recovering any data.

superscaper

What do you mean by corrupted? Have you tried recovery tools (http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.html?p=9375247&postcount=4)? There's plenty suggested on this board. What can be recovered depends on the problem you're talking about. I'm not sure many people here would have experience with such companies as they tend to backup their data. All I know is that data recovery can be a very expensive business. I presume you'll now do this in future (it's a pity it always takes a disaster before people take backing up seriously).

Racklen

my other half does this kind of thing at his own business (shameless advertising ) "does not compute" in Barnoldswick Lancashire , I know he has quite a lot of success recovering data from corrupt hard drives but it does depend on how bad the hard drive has got , I dont know how much he charges though, just be careful of the postal charges and the labour charges as I do know some people charge up to £40 a hour for repairing stuff, make sure you get a quote form them and send it via secure postal methods

Racklen

superscaper wrote: »

What do you mean by corrupted? Have you tried recovery tools? There's plenty suggested on this board. What can be recovered depends on the problem you're talking about. I'm not sure many people here would have experience with such companies as they tend to backup their data. I presume you'll now do this in future (it's a pity it always takes a disaster before people take backing up seriously).

you would be suprised on how many people dont back up there data until such a thing has happened

superscaper

Racklen wrote: »

you would be suprised on how many people dont back up there data until such a thing has happened

Tell me about it, I even ended up writing a guide (which is now a sticky on this board) to explain as much about backing up as I could. There's very much "well it won't happen to me" thinking going on I suspect. Even I've had hard drive failures etc. so it unnerves me to see people essentially put everything they have (never mind the eggs) in one basket.

BillScarab

But they keep doing it. There's was a thread over the weekend from someone who had spent enough to buy a new PC trying to fix their old one and get their data back.

Just burning your photo's and docs to DVD occassionally would save so much heartache and takes so little time but people just don't bother.

h34v3ns3nt

BillScarab wrote: »

Just burning your photo's and docs to DVD occassionally would save so much heartache and takes so little time but people just don't bother.

Its not so much people dont bother its that the task of backing up their machine is so daunting in the first place.

Also with internal/external drives getting bigger and bigger these days, up to 1TB (1000gb) in some machines thats a lot of data to lose!

Regarding the ops post, my friends dads harddrive finally died after me telling him over and over that he should back up his drive. He lost his email. He also went down the route of data recovery specialist and in the end paid around £300 to recover the data.

Ridiculous considering it takes 5 mins to back up to DVD.

Its the usual story though, until it happens, people dont take it seriously.

spakkker

Have you tried the drive in another pc?

richdeniro

spakkker wrote: »

Have you tried the drive in another pc?

Yes... Tried it on two computers, one with vista installed and one with XP. No luck on either. They couldn't read the drive.

I am able to see the c:/ drive when I run the command prompt from the Vista bootable DVD. The c:/Windows folder and c:/users folder don't show at all when I run a DIR command.

richdeniro

aknot wrote: »

Did you have Vista installed on the drive?

Yes I did.

deklan99

Try a linux live cd such as Puppy - http://www.puppylinux.com/cd-puppy.htm , http://puppylinux.org/wikka/DownloadPuppy301, <100mb, burn the iso to cd and boot up (change bios to boot from cd first - http://puppylinux.org/wikka/BootingFromCD). You can then try mounting your drive and copy stuff to a flash drive.