Firstly….I am a fool… I had every intention of performing a backup (bought an external drive a month ago) but never got round to it!!

So my laptop hard drive is unresponsive (ominous clicking sound) and wont boot up. My brother in law is having a look (hes in the IT biz) but he didn’t sound too hopeful when he had a quick look yesterday.
Im covered for repairs and stuff but a quick look at the T&Cs says data recovery isn’t included.

What are my options?
How much will it cost?
How successful will data recovery be?

My last backup (mainly photos) was in 2012…so at worst I’ve lost 2 years photos and would have to upload all my CDs again onto iTunes. All my work stuff I keep on a Memory stick and Dropbox so that’s OK…household spread sheets, letters and wife’s college stuff has gone (she e-mails the important stuff back to herself)

I’m gutted……. 😥

I’ve used CBL Data Recovery a couple of times for work. No data no fee. Even if they can get your data back they then give you an exact quote and if it’s too high then you have the option of just asking them to return your drive. If you give them a call I’m sure they can give you a ball park figure over the phone. I imagine it’ll be a few hundred pounds but less than a thousand unless your drive is really knackered.

Thanks….will look into that….

You’ve three options.

1) is professional recovery. This will most likely work, but it’s a specialist job and as Alphabet says this is likely to run to several hundreds of pounds.

2) is attempt a recovery yourself. There’s free software to do this – Recuva is well regarded – but success is hit and miss. With the symptoms you describe, I personally wouldn’t be optimistic.

3) is suck it up. Take the hit on the loss and learn not to do it again.

There are other things you can try; one that crops up occasionally is sticking it in a baggie in the freezer overnight, for instance. If you decide to go down this road, be aware that these are “mend it or end it” solutions, you will almost certainly compound the problem in the likely event that it doesn’t work and you end up sending it away anyway.

If it is clicking like you say, software will not help. It will be a mechanical issue on the hard drive.

We use Knoll ontrack at work – http://www.krollontrack.co.uk/data-recovery/?
, they take the drive apart and place the disc plates in a working hard drive. Normally over £500 but I don’t think we have had one that they couldn’t recover the data from.

Thanks again… I think I could stand a few hundred quid to get it back.
I like to learn my lessons the hard way!