Data Recovery Services

[Jimmy Swanson]

Anyone know of a good recovery service, one for personal, not commercial use? I built a new system and I was a day away from copying all the important data on my C drive (200 gig) to my new system and leaving the old one as a backup. I turned on the system and the drive began clicking so I turned it off. I tried it in an external enclosure on the other system and same thing.

This is the third drive I've ever had fail, all Western Digital. I really need to get the data from this drive. I'm willing to pay but am wondering what is a reasonable price.

Has anyone used a drive recovery service? I don't know where to begin with who to go with.

 

[bbz_Ghost]

Get ready to pay through the nose, unfortunately. Data recovery is still considered a highly specialized field to be in, so anyone that offers the capability will typically ream you on the price. If I was in your area, I'd help out no charge, but that's just the kind of person I am.

Anyway, having said that, you can do some stuff on your own. The two most popular applications that I'm aware of (three, actually) are: GetDataBack, one solution that you'll find mentioned a great deal. R-Studio would be my personal recommendation as it offers features GetDataBack simply can't touch (long story so I won't go into it here).

The third method and the one I've used most of all in several thousand data recovery jobs is EasyRecovery from Ontrack Systems, basically the largest data recovery business on the planet. The thing is: EasyRecovery ain't cheap, so the cost alone is typically prohibitive for a lot of folks - and can sometimes be more expensive than having a data recovery service handle the job for you.

Flat-rate services are preferred over a pay-per-byte scale, meaning find some company or service that says "We'll do the job for <xxx> amount of money" instead of "We'll recover data at the cost of <xxx> per megabyte/gigabyte/etc."

Hope this helps...

 

[Jimmy Swanson]

Well, I actually have Getdataback (Used it on the second WD drive). However, the drive spins up, then begins to click. When it's in the external enclosure it spins up, clicks, and then powers down a bit and powers back up...like it's restarting.

Am I looking at like $1000?

 

[bbz_Ghost]

There are two situations with data recovery:

1) Drive is in complete working condition and the data was deleted/formatted/erased/etc (aka relatively easy data recovery job, cost isn't ridiculous)
2) Drive is in a state of mechanical disfunction and data recovery would require disassembly in a clean room environment and reassembly of the platters in a functioning and identical drive assembly (aka "ludicrous" pricing)

If the drive falls under #2, then yes, get ready to pay a pretty penny for recovery.

But, just to be on the safe side, and don't dismiss this because I've been doing data recovery for nearly 25 years on over 10K drives so far - and I'm still going:

200 Ways To Recover Data From A "Dead" Hard Drive (PDF, 368KB)

I kid you not: it really does work, a lot of it, including the infamous "freezing a hard drive" trick. Ok, it doesn't require actually freezing it since that's not actually necessary, but, believe it or not that 10 minutes in the freezer has helped me recover data from several thousand drives by allowing them to function just long enough to do small chunks at a time.

YMMV, as with most any tip you get, but until you've exhausted all the methods available to you shy of cracking open the drive yourself (obviously that's not an option, really), the methods outlined in that PDF will certainly give you some options you'd probably never dreamed of.

Good luck...

 

[Jimmy Swanson]

I've gone the hair dryer route for a drive that wouldn't spin up and that worked. However, like I said it was making noise when trying to read (sounded okay simply spinning) so I think the head is screwed. My concern is that by messing with it I'll only make it worse if the head is scratching the platters or something like that.

 

[bbz_Ghost]

If you haven't dropped or hit the drive directly on the surface at some point, the chances of an actual head crash are like, between null and void. The heads never touch the platters, obviously, and the way the actuator and head assembly is manufactured, as well as the swing arm and the tolerances to which all this stuff is built simply doesn't allow for the possibility of physical damage to occur, really, without some outside force coming into play. The "head" rides a few microns above the platters, and it's so tiny it's not even funny, kinda 50x smaller than the head of a stickpin, and again, because of the way the drive is made the chances of a real head crash happening without something hitting the drive or causing pressure to warp or deflect the platters from their normal path (or the swing arm) is so close to impossible it's not even funny.

Usually the tick-tick-tick noise is because the actuator arm gets stuck - i.e. the servo that extends and retracts the swing arm stops working for whatever reason - and won't retract so it remains out of control and can't overcome the resistance necessary to return to it's "home" position. Sometimes, and this is just speaking from my own experience, sometimes I've taken a drive that is "stuck" in this way and hit it lightly on the sides, or an even better solution was to hold the drive in a horizontal position (the same way it's typically mounted, meaning label side up), and rapidly twist the drive left to right and back over and over again, then hooking it back up and seeing what happens.

The left to right twisting can sometimes free the swing arm from the "stuck" point and get it back to home - of course, powering up the drive again typically has the effect of knocking the swing arm right back to the stuck position, but then again, sometimes it works great.

Along with the recommendations in that PDF file linked above, the only time in my entire career that I have not been able to recover data - most of the time it's full, on some occasions it's partial - was when the drive was physical dead. Either the electronics failed completely, or the bearings in the drive motor froze totally for some oddball reason. In all the other cases, there was success of various levels, even on over 250 IBM "DeathStar" drives over the past few years.

Good luck...

 

[Jimmy Swanson]

Thanks for the info. I am just fearful to do too much with it as I'm worried about making it worse. I should have had a backup so maybe now I'll learn. Well, surely after paying for recovery I will.