Hard drive recovery places (for hardware failed drive) ... suggestions?

[Kwad Guy]

OK, so it looks like I'm stuck with a dead hard drive--not recognized in the BIOS, just clicks repeatedly in series of 4 when powered up...I have tried freezing the drive (no luck). It's a Western Digital 120Gb drive. The section of the drive that's important is about 30-40Gb of that.

I guess it's down to professional data recovery for me. Trouble is, there are a TON of places offering these services now, with wildly varying prices.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Some people have recommended www.adv-data.com, who promise a maximum $1200 for recovery. (Yeah, gulp, but life is like that). Ontrack is widely praised, but VERY expensive....Anyone have experience with a data recovery house they liked? I assume this one is going to require a clean room and opening the drive...

Thanks,

Kwad

P.S. Yes, I know about backups. I even have a DLT drive online to do auto backups. But for reasons not worth going into here, this particular hard drive did not get backed up...

 

[Ilmater]

Check out www.diskdoctors.com. When my hard drive went down, they said that they have a minimum (and I'm just bringing this from memory so I could be wrong) of $385 and the most expensive they'd ever done was something like $1048. They have a free evaluation, so go to that site and give them a call.