Need recommendations for hard drive recovery service (1 Viewer)

My hard drive has died and I'm looking for someone/a company that can get the data off of it without charging me my first born child as payment.

Any recommendations would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Strong Recommend for Advanced Data Recovery. Very professional, quick, and accurate. It's costly, but they are one of the best.. in years of searching for different people, they've managed to recover things that I thought were long gone.. like a damaged RAID5 in a healthcare facility

http://www.adv-data.com/

Check out the software available at www.runtime.org. I've never used it, but it looks good. It costs about $70 and claims to be able to recover after formatting, virus attack, etc. I think it's worth it as most data recovery services would probably run you close to $1000.

Thanks for the suggestions.

I should mention that the hard drive has died, so recovery software isn't going to fix my problem.

Have you tried turning it over? I have had a friend or two that was able to (slowly) get data off a dead drive just by turning it over. Probably won't work, but you would only be out a little time...

As in changing the orientation of the computer so that the drive is up side down?

Yep, though he took the drive off the rails and just turned it over. I don't know why, but he was able to recover some data. Maybe the platters had collapsed and flipping the drive over caused the spindle to reset. Or some other explanationm filled with jargon...

Also, what symptoms do you see? It could have been a cable (data or power) gone bad or a cable coming loose. Have you tried hooking up another drive to the same cables and see if it works, or using different cables on the same drive?

David,

I'm pretty sure it's a mechanical failure. Starting 3 days before the drive's death, it started making loud clicking sounds occasionally when data was being saved or accessed. I had a feeling it was going to die, but stupidly did not bother to run an immediate backup.

Ouch, the click of death. You are probably right, but at the worst you are out 10 minutes of unscrewing the case and turning it over and swapping cables.

I haven't used a data recovery service, myself, so I;m afraid I can't offer a suggestion for one. Though I have heard all the good ones are expensive...

We've unfortunately used tons of them. Be careful. A lot of those that advertise in the back of "reputable" magazines are really pretty much shams. If they can't fix it with a circuit board swap (by replacing the PCB on the drive with one of the same brand/model) then they can't do a recovery.

The real shops are much harder to find.