A mechanical failure means that your drive has broken parts that are preventing it from working—busted drives often make a telltale clicking sound as they futilely attempt to access their files. If you hear that, your data may still be there, but you're not getting it back without calling in the experts (see "Worst-Case Scenario," next page). And those experts make good money. Data recovery services from Kroll Ontrack, Seagate's i365 and Iomega charge between $500 and $2500 to attempt to salvage data from either logical or mechanical disasters, depending on the severity of the situation. But if you are just dealing with a logical failure, you can get your files back on your own for far less.
We recently attempted a data recovery from the crashed drive of a Popular Mechanics colleague whose 120 GB MacBook drive had spontaneously given up the ghost. We removed the drive from her laptop, then used our USB drive adapter to hook it up to a desktop computer for diagnosis. We didn't hear any sounds that indicated a truly dead drive, so our first step was to download the free demo diagnostic tool at Prosoft Engineering to check what might be salvageable. Many companies offer demos that will scan your drive and give you a pretty good idea of what's recoverable before you lay down money to buy their software.
Once the assessment indicated we'd get good results, we used Prosoft's Data Rescue II software ($99), which is tailored for the Mac OS and Mac-formatted drives. There are far more options for PC owners, including Prosoft's Data Rescue PC ($99), as well as Ontrack EasyRecovery DataRecovery ($199) and RecoverMyFiles ($60) from GetData.
Read more: Hard Drive Data Recovery - How to Recover Data from a Dead Hard Drive - Popular Mechanics
