Waah! My hard drive has died - is it recoverable?

[Lovecat]

I have a compaq laptop. DD knocked it off the kitchen table at the weekend onto a tiled floor and now when I switch it on I get a message that I need a new hard drive...

Took it to a local place and they put the hard drive in their machine, confirmed it was dead.

I've googled a bit and apart from a recommendation to put it in the freezer for 24 hours and try again, the only possible chance I can see of getting back the data on it (my accounts, unpublished novel, pics of DD/family etc) is using a data recovery company.

Does anyone have any experience of these and any recommendations?

Thanks so much

(and I know, I know, I should have backed the damn thing up!!)

Can't help, but I'm told those places are quite expensive. There are things they can try though that you can't.

I've read of people taking the circuitry from an identical drive and swapping it over, but I've never tackled it. Perhaps the shop might though for a smaller amount of money? It still wouldn't be cheap as they'd be trashing another drive and it still might not work.

Btw the freezing thing is true, but only really good if it's working, but not reading the data very well.

a local computer company recovered the data from my pc recently. The psu went pop (after several power cuts in a row) and took out the hard drive and various other bits. Total to fix it all and get my data back was £350. w

Thanks guys, I've called one place and they're quoting between £278 and £350 depending on the damage, so that seems reasonable and in line with what you paid OYBBK. There's no fee if they can't do anything.

Now I need to a) persuade DH that my immortal prose and photos of DD are worth £350 b) go get some bubble wrap to post it to them...

When my laptop hard drive died I took it out and put it into an external hard drive case something like this. This effectively turned my knackered hard drive into a plug and play external hard drive. I then plugged this into another computer and pulled off any recognisable files. I have no idea how much more a data recovery company can manage but this is a really simple cheap thing to try first.

Should have said that this is a pretty easy process, and as your drive is knackered anyway

Hi IAGTBF, the guy in the local computer shop did this for me, and there was nothing there - wouldn't even recognise that there was a drive on there to be had...

But ta for the tip, it could have worked!

I'd send it one of the "no recovery, no fee" places. Most of the data is still there, but how hard it is to recover depends on the amount of damage that's been done. I've never used a data recovery service, so I don't know who is good. The one that I've heard of is OnTrack.

A firm I know had their Windows Exchange mail server drive fail, and it ran into thousands to get the data back.

I would definitely get everything in writing before venturing forth with any data recovery firm.

It was worthwhile for the firm I know (consultancy, 6 years worth of important e-mail) but if you were quoted, say, 2500 quid, would photos and the book etc be worth that much (yes, OK, "priceless", but affordable?)

I don't want to be too negative, but can only suggest backup, backup, backup. This weekend one of the websites is flogging external 1,500 GB (1.5 TB) drives for under 90 quid.

It is a hard lesson, I know, but you only ever lose data once.

I still remember going white the day I formatted the wrong drive letter and 'lost' all of a GPs 4,500 patient records, that had taken a year of heartache to get entered

(They used night staff at local hospital to extract the most significant health incidents as the record for a patient only held 15 to 20 entries, back at a time when the whole machine only had 12 MB of hard disk storage {modern mobile phones can have 40 to 80 MB internal storage})

PS There's a free GigaByte of storage at www.drivehq.com and utilities from there can provide scheduled backups for a folder or several folders, or a utility which takes a snapshot of a folder and if it spots anything new, it copies it away to the DriveHQ backup store, so when you save each chapter of a book (or copy 100 photos off your camera) it will spot new stuff and back it up over your broadband link.

Too late, for your accounts etc, Lovecat, but might be worthwhile for future.

Each PC used by the family can have a free account (but remember it is only 1000 MB so don't bother using it to back up video or music files).

They do higher amounts of storage, but an external disk drive or 16 GB USB stick makes sense once you get past 3 GB of data you want to keep backed up... paying for remote storage may be OK for corporate users in case of fire etc but families have other things to spend cash on.

I wrote 'lost' because I was able to pull all the data back off their tape system, as it was part of my routine to save everything before working on their software to add functions they wanted such as handling appointments for jabs, smears, and changes to prescription printing, etc.

So the tape backup saved the day. They later added a 20 MB drive (1000 quid) to the system. It was 1984, and an original IBM PC with 192 kb of RAM (yes, I am rather ancient!) and a Hercules (mono, green on black) screen. I only got rid of it 2 years ago!