Forensic hard drive tech/service needed...

[Russwinters]

No no no no no no no no no no no no

NO Freezer.


It DOES work. But it is a shot in the dark and the people who are saying that they have had it work for them are just lucky. It's like giving someone penicillin when they have symptoms of a bacterial infection...it COULD be viral, so it may work, it may not.

The difference with the HDD is that the freezer will likely kill you chances of EVER getting the data back if it doesn't work.

The explanation of why it works at all is a bit lengthy, and better left for another topic.

The fact of the matter is a lot of people put their drive into the freezer without even knowing why the freezer WOULD work.

In order to properly fix something, you should know the principles to how that something WORKS before you try to fix it.




I am a pro in DR, I do this for my career. I can probably help out.

What is the make/model of the drive. This is very important.

Where are you located? Can you ship the drive?

Do not power on the drive anymore for ANY reason.

 

[mcurphy]

What does data recovery generally cost?

I have two hdd's that were in a raid 0 array, and my mobo crashed a couple years ago. The drives themselves are in fine working condition, at least they were when the mobo failed. I tried to replace my mobo, (I heard it was best to use the same board/ raid controller for recovery) and bought one off of eBay and of course it didn't work when I got it hooked up. It is a very outdated mobo and hard to find, so I didn't try to rebuild the system again after that. So I still have the drives that have been sitting around for 4 to 5 years, and I haven't attempted any type of recovery on them. There were some newborn pictures of my daughter on the drives that I hadn't backed up when the crash occured, so I'm curious if it's worth the money to have them recovered?

Any idea on what this type of data recovery might run?

 

[Russwinters]

RAID is always more expensive, usually by a large margin.

If you can get the exact MOBO model that would help a lot as the tech can look up RAID controller and what possible settings were used.

This type of RAID recovery basically involves figuring out what the parameters of the RAID were, (Stripe, offset, etc)

once that is found it's easy sailing.

For this, i would guess ~$1000-1500 if you sent it to one of the big companies.

If you are interested in having me take a look at it (it would go through my company)
you can PM me, I don't like to come off like I am soliciting here, because I am not; just here to help people out.

Regards,

 

[mcurphy]

Thank you for the reply Russ, and appologies to OP, didn't mean to hijack the thread.

 

[alkemyst]

What does data recovery generally cost?

I have two hdd's that were in a raid 0 array, and my mobo crashed a couple years ago. The drives themselves are in fine working condition, at least they were when the mobo failed. I tried to replace my mobo, (I heard it was best to use the same board/ raid controller for recovery) and bought one off of eBay and of course it didn't work when I got it hooked up. It is a very outdated mobo and hard to find, so I didn't try to rebuild the system again after that. So I still have the drives that have been sitting around for 4 to 5 years, and I haven't attempted any type of recovery on them. There were some newborn pictures of my daughter on the drives that I hadn't backed up when the crash occured, so I'm curious if it's worth the money to have them recovered?

Any idea on what this type of data recovery might run?

For the 40gb Ontrack wants $65 to send us a report of every file they can and cannot restore, then $695 to $1995 to pull the data down (base on XP Pro as the OS).

They can't tell the final price until they get it.

HDDGuru supposedly is an open forum and many overseas will do it for about 1/3 that.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Since it's your boss' drive, CYA man
If the freezer trick doesn't work and a professional data recovery service pronounces it irrecoverable afterwards, you = pwn3d.

 

[Russwinters]

I am an active participant in HDDguru (you can find many of my posts on there)

I can look at it for you, or I can recommend someone off of the HDDguru boards to contact in your area (where is your area?)


Regards,

 

[daw123]

I would send it to a data recovery specialist and the VP picks up the tab.

As others have said, it is not worth your job if you screw up the drive more and render it competely knackered by attempting to recover the data yourself.

 

[alkemyst]

I am an active participant in HDDguru (you can find many of my posts on there)

I can look at it for you, or I can recommend someone off of the HDDguru boards to contact in your area (where is your area?)


Regards,

Thanks, replied to your PM...we are in the Boynton Beach Florida 33426 area.