Can someone recommend me a data recovery specialist?

[rayray2]

The arm (or the mechanism that moves the arm) inside my boss's harddrive busted. She really needs the data on that hard drive! It would earn me some brownie points if I can get it fixed for her!!

 

[Automan]

If you are asking for recovery of the data it has been several years since I have had to utilize a data recovery specialist, but a company I formerly worked at used a company by the name of OnTrack Data Recovery that used to do file/data recovery. We had an old NetWare 3.x hard disk many years ago that crashed and we sent it to them for recovery. They were able to retrieve about 80% of the data for us. I do not know what their overall reputation is today, but in the past they did work well for us. I'm also not sure how much the costs would be today, they were somewhat pricey when we utilized them years ago.

Just my humble thought to try to be of assistance, hope this helps.

 

[Tallgeese]

We've used Drivesavers, with good results. Fast, professional service.

 

[kranky]

Another vote for OnTrack.

 

[Scarpozzi]

How expensive is that service these days... Last I remember it was a thousand or so base, then a certain charge depending on how many gigs you were extracting.

 

[Tallgeese]

Ours wasn't that much.

I don't have the figures handy tho.
Can post them tomorrow.

Scarpozzi mentioned a KEY point:
Most recovery companies charge a non-refundable bench fee.
If there is any data that can be recovered, the bench fee is applied toward the cost of final recovery.
Final recovery costs are normally based on the quantity of data RECOVERED.

So you should be very specific when identifying what data and data locations you want them to concentrate on, rather than just telling them to recover the whole drive.
In the case of a server, whole drive/volume is usually necessary, and the amount of data can be very large (understandably so, and largely unavoidable)
In the case of a user computer tho, you can prolly concentrate on a few primary locations:

E-mail directories
My Documents (and any other common storage locations)
Key program directories (thinkin proprietary stuff, not off-the-shelf)

You'll wanna avoid specifying large, non-essential directories in the recovery sweep if possible.
Otherwise, you could end up paying a king's ransom to recover what could easily be re-installed from installation media.

 

[bozo1]

If the arm is just the problem and it didn't crash into the platters, chances are good that you can get 100% of it back. $1K is a good estimate - I've had recovery cost both more and less than that.