Help Home Theater Forum get their hard drive recovered (1 Viewer)

[Ronald Epstein]

Hey Folks!

As many of you may be aware, we lost one of
our hard drives nearly 5 months ago.

HTF took a major hit due to this hard drive
failure for the fact that all our reviews,
member Home Theater photos and even our
scrapbook of pictures from meets over the
years were all lost.

We have just been sent the defunct hard drive
from our server company. Now we must cross our
fingers and pray that someone can ressurect what
was on that drive.

Anyone have any suggestions exactly who to send
the drive to? Need someone who is most capable of
retrieving files from hard drives that have crashed.

Any recommendations based on personal experience
would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

 

[ThomasC]

Sorry, I don't have any suggestions. I've heard that it could cost up to $1000 to recover 1MB of data. How much are you willing to spend to recover the hard drive?

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Thomas,

Honestly, we are all new to this.

Hard drive crashed and everything was lost.

It all depends on who gets recommended and
what it costs.

Thanks

 

[Nick Graham]

Ron, I'd recommend these guys.

I've seen them on the now deceased TechTV. They have had some pretty major clients, and if you look at their "Museum of Disk-asters", you can tell they have far more powerful data recovery tools than your average mom and pop certified repair shop (like mine, for instance). I doubt they are cheap, but with this type of situation, nothing will be. I'm sure we could get anough HTFers to chip in and lessen the burden if the cost is high.

 

[KenLeBlanc]

Yeah I'm new here but I'd contribute a few dollars to a paypal account. If enough people did this, it would help out with the costs. let me know...

Sorry I don't know of any companies that recover data. I downloaded a program (don't remember the name) a couple of years ago and recovered most of my data that I had lost. Maybe you could try something like this first before sending it off and paying $$$$$ ?

 

[Brian W. Ralston]

If you go with the drivesaver guys...just play up the fact that you are a non-profit web forum. And that you don't need the data anytime soon...but they can take as long as they like. It might bring the cost down significantly. Also...it is not like the drive was in a fire or submerged in water for days (like what they usually deal with)...so they may be able to get the data fairly easily. (which would also be somewhat cheaper).

 

[ThomasC]

Going off on what Ken said, has there been any attempt so far to recover the drive by using commercial software? In the process of attempting to partition my hard drive a couple months ago, I made Windows think the hard drive had been wiped. GetDataBack helped me recover everything on the drive.

 

[Scott L]

OnTrack's software recovered everything on my failed 120gb maxtor. I also did the freezer trick (Googe it for even more info) but I don't know if you want to chance that. On the upside I saved hundreds.

 

[Al.Anderson]

A little off topic, but unless you have some sort of reduced price deal with the server company they should be responsible for taking periodic backups; at least weekly. At the very least, they should provide you the capability to do the backup. I recommend you inquire about this for the next time.

 

[Brian Harnish]

Have you guys tried using the drive as a slave? If it's been used as a primary and it won't boot into windows (like mine did) you might still be able to use it as a slave and retrieve your files.

 

[Chris]

Do -NOT- do the freezer trick. If it works, it works; if not, it drastically lowers your chances of recovering anything by all other methods.

You might try contacting pros.. http://www.adv-data.com is a good resource.

 

[nolesrule]

Everyone's talking like this is a Windows drive. What OS were you using on the server? That makes a difference in both the recovery software available commercially and the price to have it done professionally.

drlabs.com here in Clearwater recovered a failed NTFS hard drive for me (my fault for not having a recent enough backup) and did an excellent and fast job of it.

 

[Chris]

I believe, as this is PHP, that the drive was Linux. (thus my rec) but Drlabs is another good one There are about five or six shops around the country I truly trust, outside of that, it's a crap shoot.

 

[nolesrule]

Chris, we posted at about the same time, so I wasn't commenting on your post.

It is possible to run php on Windows, I do it at home, but I wouldn't recommend it for a heavy-trafficked website.

 

[Parker Clack]

Thanks for all the feedback guys. The OS was Redhat Linux.

Parker