Last time MNP's drives went down someone offered some HD recovery options. I can't remember who?

Just had a friend who's drive crashed. I'm pretty sure its the controller on the drive and was thinking of buying an identical and then trying a transplant. Course, if someone that's a lot better at this would want to charge some money to fix I'd like to float the offer to her. I think I could maybe transplant the controller, but transplanting the platters, or if problems with the inner electronics might be a little out of my league.

Willie,

It was probably me that offered up the suggestion to you last time the drives crashed. Best company in the business that I have worked with would be www.ontrackdatarecovery.com

I will warn you and or your friend that data recovery is NOT Cheap no matter who does it for you especially qualified companies that use a clean room... You are charged for the size of your drive NOT the amount of data that needs restored. Even if you only need a single excel or word file or a few pictures its an all or nothing process.

The site also has software that you can purchase and run for Free as well as more sophisticated versions if you want to try to recover files due to deletion, corruption, etc. If the drive has died due to a physical failure the only way to retrieve the info is to send the drive off to have it rebuilt. If you don't have a clean room and the expertise to do it I wouldn't even attempt it.

http://store.krollontrack.com/


The last company I managed the IT department for had an old server that was out of service but a department had forgot to remove a couple files. Raid5 ended up losing 2 drives and we had to send them off for recovery. We had 2 excel files that had to be recovered as they contained extremely important government test data for the products we produced. Long story short is it cost almost $16,000 for them to rebuild all the drives and recreate the array to get the data back but we did get it back.

Home computers are normally $500-2000 to rebuild and recover.

KyleS
IT Director

Thanks Kyle!

Yeah, I've tried looking for an identical drive with no real luck. I was thinking I might be able to just swap out the external controller board and give it a shot with that. The drive is physically shot though, the bottom actually looks like it has some corrosion on the board. This makes me worried that even with a successful external swap, something internal would still be broken. The best thing I think I can do is pass along that link and tell her how much it's going to cost.

I didn't know about her computer setup, but she had no backup and all of her family pictures were on the drive. Not a good situation. It's a 500GB drive so hopefully won't be too bad.

a 500gb drive will probably run her North of $1000 (multiple platters/controllers) to restore but she should call for an estimate because costs change all the time. If I remember right they will take a deposit and she can send the drive to them. they will then diagnose the drive and give her an exact cost before she agrees to a full payment.

Thanks for the additional info. I did forget that I have a relative that does some of this type of stuff, though probably not as advanced. I'm going to see what his rates are too, but I'll be sure to pass along the info to her. Thanks!