Damaged Hard Drive, Data Recovery

Tiesto

Ok well here's the deal
I had 2 external harddrives with everything i have downloaded from the net over the last 6 years. I moved to Germany at the start of June and to reduce bulk, it would be better to put all the contents of the 2 hard drives onto one big hard drive so i bought a Western Digital My Book 250 gig. I really should have read some reviews about it before i bought it.
So i bought it a week before i left for Germany and copied everything from the 2 hard drives onto it and off to Germany i went. So i got to Germany, plugged it in and it wouldnt work. I couldnt understand why. It was well packaged for transportation and i kept it in my backpack..
So i thought maybe it was just a problem with the external case. So I took the hard drive out, bought a new external case and tryed it in this.
It still wouldnt work..
Not even a sound when its turned on...
Im guessing the hard drive is screwed.

So i got my family at home to send me over the 2 external hard drives.
Now only one of them works and the data I really need is on the one that doesnt work..
I cant understand why its not working either because they were working perfectly before i left home..

Is it possible for a hard drive not to work in a external case but to work in a desktop computer? And can anyone recommend for me any data recovery companies and how much they will cost to recover a hard drive. I did a bit of googling and it seems like its gonna be around 500 euro!!! :rolleyes:

any advice is appreciated
thanking you in advance

Cuddlesworth

Do both old hard-drives show up in the bios?

Tiesto

em i didnt try the bios cos i guessed if there was no sound coming from the harddrives after i plugged them in ....

Cuddlesworth

You can use the knoppix boot cd for a test, but it sounds like your hard-drive spindels are being damaged in transit and if that is the case 500 euros is cheap.

secret_squirrel

I've justed had my dads HD recovered by a company in the uk.
www.cbltech.co.uk.

They offer free shipment through most Mailbox etc companies (although the one I walked into didnt have a clue and I ended up posting it).

They offer a quote before doing anything, and then offer no data recovered no fee service.

Now the painful bit -

£550 + Vat = £620 ish. And yes they are pound signs!

Having said they once they recieved payment confirmation, they send the DVD's out next day delivery.

Very professional bunch to deal with.

Cuddlesworth

Sounds good but for things that are not important not worth the money. Hard-drives are the most likely part of a pc to break, hence the constant advice to back up important data.

tech

I can also confirm CBL tech are great over the year I have sent hdd to them and they also offer a FtP download if you are really stuvck for the files

ask to deal with Frank Priest

great service

TempestSabre

This is why I have multiple copies of my data. I wonder how much of 6 yr old data is important. Very little of even my work data is important after 2 yrs never mind 6.

netwhizkid

^^^ Roll on Blu Ray and HD DVD for easier backing up, It currently takes me 4 DVD's to backup my important stuff and it generally takes about two hours work.

TempestSabre

netwhizkid wrote:

^^^ Roll on Blu Ray and HD DVD for easier backing up, It currently takes me 4 DVD's to backup my important stuff and it generally takes about two hours work.

I use a Karen's Replicator and a couple of external USB 3.5 drives.
http://www.karenware.com/powertools/ptreplicator.asp
Takes about 20 mins for 200GB of data to synch. Often its about 10mins. Every so often I take a snapshop of really important stuff, documents and photos etc on to a DVD aswell. I find I was hoarding a lot of stuff but have slowly reduced the amount of stuff I store. For me Music and Video's is the main bloat. But are not that important as I have usually have the originals and if I don't, buying a couple of DVD's or CD isn't very expensive.