Can anyone recommend a company who do data recovery for crashed hard drives?

[peasoup]

Just that really. My old laptop crashed and I kept the hard drive as I was told I could send it off to get the data recovered from it. There are lots of photos and work on there that i really don't want to lose (but hadn't backed up . I've looked online and it's full of companys and lots of huge prices. My geeky friend said he's never useed a data recovery company before but imagines it's an easy way of getting ripped off price wise. Any recommendations anyone?

Can't your geeky friend just plug it onto his laptop (assuming he has one) and see if it's readable? It should be OK, unless the hard disk itself was the bit that died.

I would only go to a data recovery company with a disk that was broken or very badly corrupted. If it was another part of the laptop that died then it shouldn't be hard to get everything back, provided you have another laptop you can plug it into.

If you don't have another laptop you can plug it into, you could just buy something like this and get your geeky friend to plug it in to that, then it'll be easy to copy off everything you need. As a bonus you'll also have an external backup device :-)

Yeah I did buy an external device to house the hard drive once the laptop died but it read it for a day or two then the hard drive itself appears to have died.

if the hard disk itself is dead then it's likely to expensive . Are you sure it's the drive and not the external housing it was plugged into?

Not entirely sure I guess. I bought the housing new but I guess that might be the case. How could I check without buying a whole other housing (geeky friend lives a long way away; he was only advising me by text message!!) This happened a while ago, like a year, but I kept the hard drive to sort it out at a later date. I don't know if i have recept for the housing unit to take it back if it is a problem with the housing unit. We've moved since then and everything is in boxes.

The best way to tell if it's the disk or housing is to plug it into another laptop or another housing. Given how cheap the housings are on ebay, it's not that bad an option.

Alternatively, have you got a local computer place you can trust? (obviously not PC World).

Does this help? OK, it's more or less a sales blurb for OnTrack Data Recovery, but the questions they ask make sense. Of course the cost isn't something that they show on their website, but they do have a free phone number, so you can ring up and ask.

For what it's worth (not much) I think I've heard of OnTrack Data Recovery before.

It is important to establish whether the hard disk has completely and utter failed, whether windows is just refusing to boot.

Before doing anything to your laptop. I would try and boot up the laptop with something like a live LINUX CD eg. UBUNTO. See if its possible to view the hard disk. You might be able to transfer data to a USB stick.

help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD

If you are technically confident and you have a windows installation disk you could try creating a windows CD called Bart PE.

www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

Thanks you two. The laptop died about a year ago. I got a techy bloke round and he looked at it and advised me to get an external hardrive housing device so i could get the data off the hard drive as the laptop itself wouldn't boot up (can't remenber the details as it was a year ago and I'm no expert). So I did get the external housing device but, although it worked for a few days and I transferred some data, it suddenly stopped working. My friend's 19 year old techy son told me I needed a data recovery company, but, come to think of it, it could have been the external housing unit failing I suppose. I'll try and hook up with a techy local to try it out on their laptop I guess. I'll check out ONTRACK Data recovery if not.
By the way, now I have a couple of you knowledgeable people online, I've been fiddling around with my photos and have a whole file of photos I want to resize to make them very low res. Someone wants me to send them a disc of photos and i want them to be able to view them but don't want them to be able to print them out (except at very low res so they wouldn't think it worth their while to bother printing them) Question is: how do I resize about 200 photos in one go? I only know how to go through one by one and resize each individually and that'll take all day. Just thought I'd ask as i've been mulling it over this past hour and you two sound techy. Thanks for advice

The way I'd do the resizing is kind of techie and involves using Linux. I wouldn't know where to start on a Windows PC.