Dad's work laptop hard drive crashed and IT can't recover any data

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NFS4

NFS4

No Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
72,636
47
91
He has a Compaq Armada laptop (old PIII 500MHz model) and the hard drive took a dump on itself. His IT department said it's fubar'd, but he NEEDS the data off the drive. Are there any places where he could send if off to for data recovery (and maybe some local to the RTP area here in NC?).

And how good are these places at recovering data? Cost is not an issue b/c he'll just bill it to the company.
 
V

Vegito

Diamond Member
Oct 16, 1999
8,329
0
0
yeah most simple recovery cost around 1k and like $50-$100 bucks for each additional hour searching for stuff missed by initial scan, etc.. sometimes per meg charge and cost of cd/dvd media (like $10 a disc). Some place lets you send a good drive to dump the stuff to..
 
A

Arcanedeath

Platinum Member
Jan 29, 2000
2,822
1
76
Ontrack data recovery services is normaly pretty good about getting data back you can check them out at ontrack.com
 
C

Chronoshock

Diamond Member
Jul 6, 2004
4,860
1
81
Surprising that no backups were created. As people have said, data recovery services are expensive. And since the IT people said it was fubar'ed you can assume it'll be pretty expensive to get the data back. Any idea how many gigs?
 
NFS4

NFS4

No Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
72,636
47
91
Originally posted by: Chronoshock
Surprising that no backups were created. As people have said, data recovery services are expensive. And since the IT people said it was fubar'ed you can assume it'll be pretty expensive to get the data back. Any idea how many gigs?
Click to expand...

It's a 20GB drive. Probably about 4-6GB used.
 
T

tehtank

Member
Aug 31, 2004
75
0
0
We've spent 1,000 - 2,000 with *I think* Ontrack, recovering a few ~500mb .pst files..

Not cheap =p
 
Jeff7

Jeff7

Lifer
Jan 4, 2001
41,596
20
81
Originally posted by: NFS4
He has a Compaq Armada laptop (old PIII 500MHz model) and the hard drive took a dump on itself. His IT department said it's fubar'd, but he NEEDS the data off the drive. Are there any places where he could send if off to for data recovery (and maybe some local to the RTP area here in NC?).

And how good are these places at recovering data? Cost is not an issue b/c he'll just bill it to the company.
Click to expand...

How good is the IT department? Did they just turn on the laptop and try to access the disk with Explorer, or did they actually try any recovery measures?
Some IT departments know little about PC's. Where my dad worked, back when they first got PC's there, the IT department guy they hired knew almost nothing about PC's. He knew how to program mainframes. So their IT head was asking most people there for help with his computer. They have since hired people a little bit more suited for the job. A little bit anyway. They still consider Spybot to be a malicious program.
 
gsellis

gsellis

Diamond Member
Dec 4, 2003
6,061
0
0
Just remember that if the hardware (head for example) went Tango Uniform, additional attempts to recover data can damage it more. A good recovery center may need to take the drive apart in a clean room and extract the data from the platters. Not cheap and starts at about $1k. They used to charge by the MB of the drive. ;)
 
P

PlatinumGold

Lifer
Aug 11, 2000
23,168
0
71
i got a friend who will do Ontrack on the hd for a reasonable cost (mb $150.00 to $200.00) no guarantees tho, they will just run ontrack on it and recover what they can. if it has serious hardware issues (head crashed etc) than they can't do anything for you as they don't have a clean room.

 
J

JackBurton

Lifer
Jul 18, 2000
15,993
14
81
Originally posted by: NFS4
He has a Compaq Armada laptop (old PIII 500MHz model) and the hard drive took a dump on itself. His IT department said it's fubar'd, but he NEEDS the data off the drive. Are there any places where he could send if off to for data recovery (and maybe some local to the RTP area here in NC?).

And how good are these places at recovering data? Cost is not an issue b/c he'll just bill it to the company.
Click to expand...
If the drive spins up, you can use some data recovery software to try and pull the data off. HOWEVER, if there is no disc activity, or the drive is not recognized in the BIOS, it's jacked! You've no choice but to send it off. We use the company Reliant linked, Drive Saver to recover our data. But at this point you'll have to ask yourself just how important the data is to you. Just to have them look at the drive is about $200. If they are able to recover the data, the price would be in the range of $500 to ~$3000 (normally it's around the $1000-$2000 range though).

 
NFS4

NFS4

No Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
72,636
47
91
The IT folks put my dad's drive in the freezer and were able to recover most of the data. WHOOSH :D
 
C

CraigRT

Lifer
Jun 16, 2000
31,440
5
0
I sent a drive to data recovery once... after it was not recoverable using first method of data recovery, the drive was shipped to Toronto, and put into a dust free room, they attempted to get data off the drive, but it was still too damage (surface damage to platters) They told me even if they could get 1 file off the hard drive, it would be minimum $2000

no matter how much $, nothing was recoverable on the drive... it was garbage, and 2 years of data were gone.
 
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