Data recovery, external hard disks, know how required

[JD]

Hi guys and girls, one for those that have experienced this before and know good places to get this sorted.

I have two Maxtor external HDD. Both broke within about 6 months of ownership (second was a replacement for the first, straight from Maxtor Europe, so now on my third replacement ).

There is about 20 gigs of photos (maybe less) that I have lost between each (around 15gb and 5gb split).

Does anyone know how much this will cost to recover? Had them lying around since being told they are not covered by insurance in 1st year Uni (about 5 years ago!!!). Had a convo before and thought about them, and know how useful you lot are!

Cheers for any advice!

Jamie

 

[McBunny]

tbh its not worth it if its a mechanical failure and it sounds like it is your looking at about £1k per drive


http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.co.uk/

 

[JD]

Seriously Mike? Bloody hell, makes me so angry. Two failures within six months.

 

[McBunny]

yup our ex md tried to get them to repair his drive they couldnt get a new head for it iirc so souldnt get it back without it costing shitloads

 

[FiXX]

yeh as said its an absolute fortune! i was quoted 1.5k for a 500 gig external hdd and that was with the data sent back to me on dvd-r's

 

[Cookie]

Yarp, I shall 3rd or 4th the fact you're looking at thousands

They'll charge you hundreds even for giving it a go and failing.

 

[FiDoDiDo]

If it's mechanical you might have luck with changing the electronics on the hard drive as this sometimes works.

 

[DMS]

Firstly take the hard drive out of the caddy and plug it straight into a PC via IDE / SATA to see if it works or not. You'll also be able to tell if it spins up.
If that doesn't work and you can find an identical hard drive, swap the disk controllers over as mentioned above and try again.
If that doesn't work you might have to go to a data recovery specialist. Disklabs in Tamworth are very good and not too badly priced. They don't charge if they can't recover the data either, so no risk of losing money for nothing. Still a lot of cash though, so you've got to weigh up whether the data is worth it or not.

 

[Darren S]

tbh its not worth it if its a mechanical failure and it sounds like it is your looking at about £1k per drive


http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.co.uk/

^^^ - I can vouch for those guys. We had a Mac drive fail with shitloads of photos on it at work.

Cost around £75 for the initial analysis, and a further £900+ for the recovery itself. They managed to get back pretty much every file (literally single figures in ones that were too corrupted) and as such, was well worth the money.

I tend to steer well clear of Maxtor drives as the failure rate we've suffered is much higher than other makes. How happy was I when I found that our Mitel phone switches ran on Maxtor drives.

D.

 

[JD]

Thanks for the replies guys. If I only wanted certain files (photos totallying a couple of gig, not 100's) would they be able to do just that, or is it and all or nothing deal?

 

[Turkish]

I've got a HDD at home that I'd love to recover the contents from but £900 + !!! The symptoms I had were a clicking noise against the case.

 

[JD]

I had the same before mine blew mate, twice. Takes the piss that Maxtor would not do anything about it, since they are technically responsible for it's failure. However, I guess I will never not back up again.

 

[FiDoDiDo]

All or nothing really, if the disk is recovered then the chances are it's all (almost all) going to be recovered.

 

[shadowsun]

Seriously, stay AWAY from Maxtor drives where possible. There's a reason why companies like Dell and Apple use Western Digital or Seagate!

I found that the cheaper FREECOM brand of external hard drives prooved to be the most robust and they use Samsung drives inside. Cracking unit.

As for recovery, it's already been said - crack it open and hook the drive up directley via IDE or SATA. This is what I did when my Maxtor Onetouch also died after a few weeks.