please help! laptop drive crashed. revovery?

[pacattack76]

I'm In desperate need of help. A couple years ago, my hard drive in my laptop took a shock and began making mechanical noises. Bearings bad or something. Anyway, I've saved the hard drive these last couple years even after the laptop was long gone. I'm heart broken because shortly after my wedding, all of my pictures were stored here and the drive went bad before I could back them up. The drive wont work and i can't retrieve anything. I'm told for around $400-500, someone could go in and possibly find at least some if not most of my pics. Problem is, I don't have any money to do this. I'm looking for someone who knows how to do this and would be willing to help me. Those pictures were all I had and I'd do anything to get them back. Please help.

 

[carnageX]

If the click of death is coming from the drive, you're pretty much SOL. You can try the freezer trick...but no guarantee of it working. Best bet is to pony up the $ and send it to a data recovery lab where they can take the platters out safely in a clean room and extract the data.

 

[MidnightShadow]

If the click of death is coming from the drive, you're pretty much SOL. You can try the freezer trick...but no guarantee of it working. Best bet is to pony up the $ and send it to a data recovery lab where they can take the platters out safely in a clean room and extract the data.

This is pretty much it. Also, the $400-500 is a low estimate. I would definitely expect and plan to pay as much as $3,000. Level I recovery starts at $250. Level II recovery runs around $500-700, and Level III can run up to $3,000. There's only one right way to get the data off of there, and it's not cheap.

Also, before you try the freezer trick, keep in mind that if it doesn't work and it damages the drive further, you could end up making your bill higher through data recovery.

 

[pacattack76]

did I mention, I don't have any money? We live on $600 per month. No way yo "pony up" anything. The company I contacted never mentioned no $3000. I told them what was going on and they said for everything that needs to be done, it would be about 400. Thought there might be someone here that knows how to do it but apparently not. The drive will sit. I've read about the whole freezer thing. That's just dumb and I'm not about to do it. This is the whole problem with people nowadays. No one will help because its needed. It's all about the almighty dollar. Plain and simple greed. You can't take it with you when you go either. If I knew how to do it and someone came to me in need, I wouldn't charge them.

 

[carnageX]

did I mention, I don't have any money? We live on $600 per month. No way yo "pony up" anything. The company I contacted never mentioned no $3000. I told them what was going on and they said for everything that needs to be done, it would be about 400. Thought there might be someone here that knows how to do it but apparently not. The drive will sit. I've read about the whole freezer thing. That's just dumb and I'm not about to do it. This is the whole problem with people nowadays. No one will help because its needed. It's all about the almighty dollar. Plain and simple greed. You can't take it with you when you go either. If I knew how to do it and someone came to me in need, I wouldn't charge them.

Not sure what you're going on about man... We gave our suggestion because that's the only solution. We offered our help to you. There wasn't any judgement. And yes I understand that you mentioned $ is an issue...but when there are very little working solutions that are "safe" for clicking drive data recovery, then you limit to the good suggestions - which unfortunately one of which is very expensive data recovery.

Once a drive starts making the "Click of Death" there's VERY few solutions that actually work. The freezer trick works sometimes by placing it in a ziplock bag, letting it sit in the freezer for a few hours, then quickly hooking it back up to the PC and trying to extract data off of it before the platters/head warm up enough to warp. Takes several attempts usually as well, depending on how much data you need to recover.

As for the money issue...we all have money issues man. Unfortunately, data recovery in a highly controlled clean room is expensive, thus the companies that offer the service charge high $. I'm sure you could build your own clean room / clean environment, but you'd need to be extremely careful.

If the data is that important to you, keep the drive in a anti-static back, in a safe environment and save up cash over time to eventually get data recovered. Unfortunately the price for the service for recovering data won't be going down any time soon. I was quoted by SeaGate a few years ago for a drive that died to be between $400 and $700, and this was about 7 years ago.

 

[MidnightShadow]

did I mention, I don't have any money? We live on $600 per month. No way yo "pony up" anything. The company I contacted never mentioned no $3000. I told them what was going on and they said for everything that needs to be done, it would be about 400. Thought there might be someone here that knows how to do it but apparently not. The drive will sit. I've read about the whole freezer thing. That's just dumb and I'm not about to do it. This is the whole problem with people nowadays. No one will help because its needed. It's all about the almighty dollar. Plain and simple greed. You can't take it with you when you go either. If I knew how to do it and someone came to me in need, I wouldn't charge them.

Wow... I'm pretty sure that most of us are here on the forums to help when needed. Many of us are experts in certain areas, but by no means in every single area. Data recovery is not something that I've ever done personally, so I can't advise on the process. It's not about greed and money, it's about expertise and time. I would suggest that you read the blog I listed below. It will help explain why some labs charge more than others. You can do whatever you want and take it wherever you want, but make an informed decision before you do it. Otherwise, you may regret the decision later.

https://www.gillware.com/blog/data-recovery/drives-cost-data-recovery/

 

[pacattack76]

I forget the name of the company. It's only been a few months since I checks but ill know the name she I see it. Will have to look it up. Price was based on size and i think OS. Since its an older 80gb with XP on it, price was quoted at $400. I'm completely frustrated as I feel like ill never get them back. What gets me even more I I never got around to backing them up. Nowadays, I have all my files on more than one hard drive including SD cards and USB sticks.

 

[carnageX]

Be careful, because flash storage can suffer from data rot. Flash storage needs to be plugged back in every few years so that random bits don't flip (from a 0 to a 1, or vice versa).

I would recommend both on-site storage as well as some sort of cloud storage for things that you'd like to keep.

 

[pacattack76]

I plug those things in every few months. Even if they did fail, I have everything on 3 computers. I never understood this whole cloud thing and storing stuff on something you can't touch or is controlled by someone else. What if it all went down?

 

[carnageX]

I plug those things in every few months. Even if they did fail, I have everything on 3 computers. I never understood this whole cloud thing and storing stuff on something you can't touch or is controlled by someone else. What if it all went down?

Then they would be able to restore their lost data much easier / faster than you would be able to because they usually have data centers full of data .

But that's also why I said have a local backup + cloud backup.