Recommendation for Data Recovery svc?

[4HOLIDAYS]

I am hoping someone here can recommend a data recover svc. There are sooo many listed online.

Our family came home from vacation and found that our external harddrive with ALL our photos is not working. It powers up, can here it spinning, it tries to communicate but no files, folders...can be found.

I am sick. About half the photos are on disks as well, some on assorted pc's but this was the main system for my backup. Dh said these are indistructable...now he knows why I was asking about a 2nd backup a couple months ago.

A co called diskdr's, had a address in local area. DH took it there, a receptionist said no one is avail at the time but they'd call us. We get a quote via email 45 min later, for about $1600,. DH tries the # to call and it goes to call center in Atlanta, they say there is no way to talk local or to any tech, so DH went to go pick it back up. I guess it is only a drop point, the HD was never touched. The secretary there just generates a quote based on the item type, size...

I don't want it to go back to Iomega and have them just repair and lose the data. I am sick over the cost but the photos are priceless to me.

If anyone has suggestions or experience with this situation, please let me know. Thanks so much.

 

[SplashMo]

Could you send a link to the external drive an/or the manufacture / model number? You may be able to mount the drive in a new housing and it may work. New housings are 20-30 dollars. You might ask a computer friend to help....

 

[SplashMo]

....

 

[cobright]

Before you do anything else:

Are you powering the drive with a separate power supply? If you are jyst pluggong it into a usb, that method can fail to initialize the drive. Switch up the usb cord and make sure you are plugging into a usb 2.0 port.

But best is to use external power supply for external drive.

 

[RitchG]

Greetings.

I spent many years in IT consulting and at least once a month I had a client that lost a hard drive (internal/external). Here is the process I came up with for dealing with this situation:

1. Cable - swap IDE/SATA/USB cable and IDE/SATA/USB port to make sure it isn't a connection issue.
2. Power Supply - is the power supply working? Can it be swapped with another to check? If powered directly from the USB port can an external power supply be used? (USB ports are limited in the amount of power they can supply; as a hard drive ages its power requirements increase.)
3. Enclosure - if the drive is external, remove it from the enclosure and using either a hard drive adapter or another enclosure, see if the drive will work on/in another adapter/enclosure. (See http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812232002 or http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817145167 for example.)
4. Recovery - Pack the drive carefully and send it to Kroll-OnTrack Recovery (http://www.krollontrack.com/data-recovery/). They have an excellent track record and have never let me (or a client) down. They will charge $75 to look at the drive and $800-2100 to recover the data (pricing is from last year).

HTH.
---Ritch

 

[John Marker]

3 months back, when I lost important photos from hard drive then after spending lots of time on Google I found one cost efficient data recovery utility “remo recover”. By utilizing this tool I recovered data without giving any extra effort. You can also try it.

 

[4HOLIDAYS]

Thanks for ideas...I just wanted to let everyone know that it has worked out for us.

My DH decided to take it to Comp usa/tiger direct near us. The tech hooked it up , said they could see the info still there, get the info off for $95, we just needed to get a new HD. DH bought a Western Digital, Raid 1, dual mirror drive, 4TB each. There was almost a full TB on it and it took 2 days or better to be transferred according to the tech its all there and I could not be happier.

So, so happy!

 

[Daisy14'sDH]

Great news!