Hard Drive Recovery

Macker1

Folks,

Just wondering can anyone recommend a reputable company / specialist that would work in the field of Hard Drive Recovery.

A neighbour of mine recently had the misfortune of suffering a pwer-cut which has damaged his Hard Drive. The PC will no longer boot up and despite my best efforts I've been unable to get the problem resolved. I did get to the stage of been able to at least see the drive but it is showing as corrupt and will not allow further progress.

His main concern is for all the pictures that are in his C: Drive (family & new baby) so he is wondering can he bring it to an expert for retrieval purposes. I did explain that this would be costly and still might not prove successful.

He has now learned a valuable lesson about the resons for having an external Hard Drive for the storage of important info. A bit late now..........


Any suggestions welcomed.

Capt'n Midnight

if you can put it in as a slave in another machine you can use photorec to pull the pictures back even if the file system is toast


does the drive make harsh noises or the dreadded ball bearing dropping ?
if the drive is fried then clean room data recovery will almost certainly work but prices START at €400

Standard Toaster

www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

Has saved my bacon many times from pcs, laptops to servers.

Macker1

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

if you can put it in as a slave in another machine you can use photorec to pull the pictures back even if the file system is toast


does the drive make harsh noises or the dreadded ball bearing dropping ?
if the drive is fried then clean room data recovery will almost certainly work but prices START at €400

I have tried to put the drive in two other PC's as slave but to no avail. Being honest I think the drive is beyond recovery by normal methods as when I did eventually get into the drive in windows recovery it was showing as corrupt. As I said the owner will have a decision to make based on the cost if he wants to try and get his pictures back using a specialist.

Toots

There's a place called Back From The Future on Adelaide road who I sent my hard drive into when I broke it (it was external and I knocked it off the table when it was switched on). They're meant to be brilliant, and I definitely found them very nice and helpful. They charge €50 to take a look and see if they can find anything, often they can do it straight away, and then if they have to keep it in for longer and more work has to be done then there can be a further charge, but they'll call you and advise you. In my case after they took it into their clean room and opened it up they found I needed a new part for it, which would cost a fair bit (upwards of €500), but they rang me and said I could take it back if I wanted and drop it back to them any time if I decided I wanted get the part. They were working on the drive for over a week trying to get stuff off it and they never charged me any more than the €50 deposit I originally paid!

Macker1

Toots85 wrote: »

There's a place called Back From The Future on Adelaide road who I sent my hard drive into when I broke it (it was external and I knocked it off the table when it was switched on). They're meant to be brilliant, and I definitely found them very nice and helpful. They charge €50 to take a look and see if they can find anything, often they can do it straight away, and then if they have to keep it in for longer and more work has to be done then there can be a further charge, but they'll call you and advise you. In my case after they took it into their clean room and opened it up they found I needed a new part for it, which would cost a fair bit (upwards of €500), but they rang me and said I could take it back if I wanted and drop it back to them any time if I decided I wanted get the part. They were working on the drive for over a week trying to get stuff off it and they never charged me any more than the €50 deposit I originally paid!

Sounds good. Do you happen to have a contact phone number or email address for these guys.....

Macker1

The_Edge wrote: »

www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

Has saved my bacon many times from pcs, laptops to servers.

I ran spinrite which took around 9.5 hours to complete at level 2. Unfortunately is did not suceed in getting the PC to Boot up. I did use a Knoppix boot CD which worked as far as booting up from CD but from what I could make out it would appear that the files on the HD are corrupt.The latest error message that I'm getting is as follows.............

NTLDR is missing

Press any key to restart

Any suggestions on how best to proceed

daftdave

Macker1 wrote: »

I ran spinrite which took around 9.5 hours to complete at level 2. Unfortunately is did not suceed in getting the PC to Boot up. I did use a Knoppix boot CD which worked as far as booting up from CD but from what I could make out it would appear that the files on the HD are corrupt.The latest error message that I'm getting is as follows.............

NTLDR is missing

Press any key to restart

Any suggestions on how best to proceed

a quick google and i found this
http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000465.htm

raindog.promo

Macker1 wrote: »

Sounds good. Do you happen to have a contact phone number or email address for these guys.....

Back From The Future,
77 Aungier Street,
Dublin 2.

Don't know if you're allowed post other people's numbers on the board but you can get it here anyway.

http://www.dublinks.com/index.cfm/loc/5-35/pt/0/spid/FB93AD43-98FD-40FF-B1CCD50E2A57EB84.htm

ntlbell

have you tried just using a spare disk and a linux boot disk?

you should be able to get all the data across, there's another good product I have used in the past which the name escapes me i'll dig it out.

Macker1

ntlbell wrote: »

have you tried just using a spare disk and a linux boot disk?

you should be able to get all the data across, there's another good product I have used in the past which the name escapes me i'll dig it out.

Used Knoppix to boot up. Files are all showing as corrupt. I could'nt even copy them over to a USB stick.

Have to be honest I'm tearing my hair out at this (not even my PC) :rolleyes:

mccutchie

I'm suffering the same fate. 60Gb external hard disk I had went on friday, cannot detect it now, and have tried bart pe and the ultimate boot disk and neither can pick it up.

I'm desperate at this stage and may now have to go down the commercial route unless anyone here has a better idea...

justin001

You can recover the corrupted data with the help of data recovery software. I have used Stellar Phoenix data recovery software that provides good recovery solution. Run the partition recovery software and see weather your file to recover your file. Download the free demo version of the software from
http://www.stellarinfo.com/partition-recovery.htm
It scans your hard drive and you will able to see the preview of your recoverable file. Once you see the preview go for full version to complete your recovery.

Nothingbetter2d

Macker1 wrote: »

NTLDR is missing

Press any key to restart

Any suggestions on how best to proceed

this can be fixed with your windows cd

boot to first stage setup and choose r to repair

the repair console will load dos
once in dos mode
then type cd\
then type (where d: is your cd drive)
COPY \I386\NTLDR C:\
COPY \I386\NTDETECT.COM C:\

reboot and hopefully it should boot.

failing that boot back to your windows cd and choose install windows, it will tell you there is already a copy of windows on your drive, then choose a repair installation (it will reinstall windows over itself and all the files will be fresh (you will need to reinstall all the windows updates) but it should boot long enough for you to backup your stuff