HDD failure

E

eurin

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Aug 14, 2005
Messages
1,132
I had my Western Digital 500gb SATA hdd (WD5000AAKS) suddenly fail overnight. It was a secondary drive, and windows wouldn't pass chkdsk with it in. Now it struggles to even show up in the bios, but after a few attempts I was able to try the WD diagnostic tool on it, which will fail quickly and give unspecific error codes.

I need to weigh my options. I had to reformat windows a few weeks ago, so I had everyone on this drive, and forgot back it up on the main drive once I did the reformat. I built my i7 computer last week, but hadn't moved back ups to it either since I've barely used it.

How much do data recovery services run? I'm assuming very expensive. I think I mainly just had songs and movies on the drive. A good chunk of my personal data was backed up to an old Pentium 4 system, but there would be some more recent stuff lost on this drive.

I should probably come up with a better back up system than relying on me remembering to manually update.
 
There are a lot of freeware data recovery programs that run in DOS that have various degrees of success at recovering files. A google search will give you your options and you can give a few a try. If all you lost was music and movies you may just want to use this as a reminder to back up valuable data. Don't even bother with data recovery services if there was nothing on the hard drive that you desperately need to recover. Professional data recovery starts at a couple hundred dollars and can easily get over a grand.
 
I do data recovery at my office in Lake Jackson, TX.

We generally start the cost at $150 if any data at all is recovered, then depending on what processes are needed to be done, and if any extra hardware is needed to be purchased in order to dump the data onto, etc etc, the cost of course goes up from there, and we call with additional costs as they come up if they do.

If we do not recover the data there is no cost to you, except getting the drive back to you so we can cover shipping costs.

We also have a clean room accessable to us however it starts at roughly $1,500 to even get it sent there.

Send me a PM or something if you want any more details, otherwise I may forget to check back into this thread. =P
 
Hmm, the wide range on estimates scares me. I'd suck it up and drop $150 if I knew that was the limit.

I tried it again today in my i7 machine. I still can't recognize the drive in dos. I have gotten it to launch into Windows 7, but the drive doesn't appear and can't be detected.
 
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