MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
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Any have any recommendations for firms that do HDD data recovery - I have a crashed laptop drive and an external HDD with loads of photo's / music on that both appear borked. No problem sending off and budget not an issues (well, within reason..... 8O) - it's more the sentimental value.
Cheers in advance......
I've used [url= http://www.cbldatarecovery.co.uk/ ]CBL Data Recovery[/url] a few times for work. They will let you know what they can recover and how much it will cost. They've been in business for many, many years and really know their stuff. If you decide not to go ahead then they just return your drive. Very nice people and I don't think their prices are very high although I haven't used them for a couple of years.
Just use your backups. Oh.
Ontrack are the gold standard. http://www.krollontrack.co.uk/data-recovery
budget not an issues
That's just as well.
For the crashed laptop you could try getting the drive out and put it in a hard drive caddy then browse to to it from another computer, just like a USB drive
. Might just be the boot portion of it that is bust.
Ive done this loads of times, caddies can be bought for just a couple of quid from ebay.
Second on the DIY caddy option as a first attempt. It was just one portion of the HDD that had gone and I could recover everything with a caddy.
They're cheap, what I have is similar to this (though without the SD card readers): http://www.amazon.co.uk/SATA-2-Dock-Docking-Station-e-SATA/dp/B009WK1UY4/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1439804541&sr=8-2&keywords=HDD+docking+station
For the crashed laptop you could try getting the drive out and put it in a hard drive caddy then browse to to it from another computer, just like a USB drive
There are various methods you could use to try and recover it. Recuva is well regarded, for instance, and sometimes Linux can read things Windows can't and vice versa. "Appearing borked" and "actually borked" are two different things, and just because a laptop won't boot doesn't mean there's anything actually wrong with the disk. A more comprehensive description of symptoms than "borked" might help us diagnose what's going on, it could be a simple fix.
However, assuming it is actually a knackered disk: if you're going to send it away then the less buggering about you do with it, the easier (and therefore, cheaper) it'll be for the recovery company. Every time you power it up, you risk compounding the problem. So you need to work out whether your lost data that wasn't worth fifty quid to back up onto a second hard drive yesterday is suddenly worth the best part of a grand to repair today, and choose which path you want to take before cocking about with it yourself too much.
Send them the whole laptop not just the disc. I handed in a computer that wouldn't boot and they fixed by installing a new operating system and putting all my old data on a separate partition so I could recover everything with a caddy if necessary. It lasted another couple of years and I now use the HD in its caddy as an external hard drive for backing up. It cost peanuts, I don't know how these people make a living.
Seems strange that two drives have failed. Try the external drive on another computer, and try a caddy for the internal drive