Decent hard-drive data recovery business in St Petersburg, FL?

[brxndxn]

My friend's new hard drive just failed while he was backing up a lot of data to it. He needs a data recovery center - preferably in St. Petersburg, FL. Was just wondering if anyone's had good luck with a company in that area (or company with reasonable rates anywhere.)

 

[crispy2010]

There was a thread bout freezing the hdd in a block of ict to get it working again. How important is data? Data recovery is realy expensive!

I will see if I can find the link!

 

[CQuinn]

"There was a thread bout freezing the hdd in a block of ict to get it working again"

No there wasn't, at least I hope there wasn't... The "freezer trick" only works if the damage to the drive was caused by it malfunctioning from overheating,
or from stuck read/write heads. It is not a cure-all for everytime of drive problem.

What kind of hard drive? (How big is it)? How was it partitioned/formatted?
What kind of failure (Did it just stop working, or did the operating system report an error transferring files)?
Does it still start up?

Data Recovery services may charge more for drives that will not spin up on thier own, and for the size of the drive
(based on the amount of data they will be attempting to recover).

There may be some things you or your friend can do yourselves to recover the data, depending on how bad a failure it was.

You said he was backing up data to it, what happened to the originals?

 

[GalvanizedYankee]

Originally posted by: brxndxn
My friend's new hard drive just failed while he was backing up a lot of data to it. He needs a data recovery center - preferably in St. Petersburg, FL. Was just wondering if anyone's had good luck with a company in that area (or company with reasonable rates anywhere.)

I would suggest PMing FlyingPenguin. He does comp repair in Centeral FL.
If your buddy does need HD recovery he could refer him to a decent local company.

http://theflyingpenguin.com/ The link is offered because it is in his sig.


...Galvanized

 

[kranky]

I wouldn't be too concerned about finding a place that's local. If you must have the data, send it to Ontrack or a similar place that is first-rate at recovering stuff from dead drives. I wouldn't let some wannabe operation take a shot and end up making things worse.

 

[Zepper]

I think Ontrack has a florida office, but I'm not sure where. They are good but very pricey.

.bh.

 

[poisonthewell]

Originally posted by: crispy2010
There was a thread bout freezing the hdd in a block of ict to get it working again. How important is data? Data recovery is realy expensive!

I will see if I can find the link!

Please do find us this link where someone sticks their hdd in WATER and freezes it (assuming "ict" in your post is supposed to be "ice").

 

[1sikbITCH]

Here you go: Frozen solid!

From this thread: http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=50&threadid=1768416&enterthread=y

:beer:

 

[jpidata]

JP idata Recovery Lab offer a reasonable rates for data recovery service

http://www.jpidata.com

 

[poisonthewell]

Originally posted by: 1sikbITCH
Here you go: Frozen solid!

From this thread: http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=50&threadid=1768416&enterthread=y

:beer:

Nice. Three :beer::beer::beer: for you.

 

[Kwad Guy]

I have initiated recovery from hard drives both by the freezing trick and by the "WHOMP! There it is" bang on the desk trick. The former works occasionally, but don't hold your breath. The latter probably works more than rarely, but rarely am I willing to do it (not only voids your warranty, but is just as likely to make your drive completely unrecoverable if it was just iffy before).

If your drive spins up but has bad sectors, then there are a number of software programs that can be quite helpful. Two that I personally STRONGLY recommend are R-Studio (especially strong for Linux recoveries using their FREE (!!) R-Linux module), and Spinrite. I've pulled a lot of butts out of the fire with these EXCELLENT utilities.

If your drive won't spin up...you're SOL without a very expensive drive recovery service (who may well also come up empty handed but may well charge you a lot to tell you that)...Or, you can try the "WHOMP!" method, which does actually sometimes unfreeze a drive that won't spin up (but again, you have to be willing to accept the consequences).

Kwad