Hard drive recovery (in Off-topic)

Does anybody have a success story? I live near Berkeley, CA so if any locals have a good place let me know. Thanks.

symptoms?

(that isn't a suggestion you try and boot it again btw)

It's an external drive that doesn't sound like it's spinning. I haven't tried a new power supply/housing yet or putting it in a computer, but I suspect it's dead.

For a couple grand, you can most likely get all of your data back. Most places that sell that service just underwrite for someone else.

was it a cheap external case bought separately from the hard drive or a drive and case all bought together?

Freeze it!!!

If its extremely important than you can pay the high fees from a professional to try to get it recovered, else just toss it and mark as a loss. Its expensive to try to salvage from a broken hard drive. backups.....

My external corrupted last week. Am using a data recovery demo to get what I can back. >.>

It was a cheap (Western digital maybe) drive in a cheap enclosure, been running nonstop for five years. It's connected to an old laptop and sits in a cabinet connected to my network. I use it to store pictures and music mostly. I haven't checked it out because it's behind the Christmas tree and kind of a pain to get to right now. I have 80-90 % of it backed up on disks or other computers, but was hoping to not have to re-rip my music, and get back the other 20 % of my pictures. It's not worth $2000.00 but I'd spend a few hundred to get my photo's back.

if it was a cheap enclosure, those things go out frequently. the drive might still be fine.

take the drive out of the enclosure and install directly into a computer... as a secondary drive of course...

the guts in the enclosure that take it from ide/sata to usb goes out faster and more often than the actual drive

I was hoping for the best (bad enclosure) but planning for the worst. It's good to hear that the enclosures fail frequently, it gives me hope.

If you don't see any lit LEDs on the case, it's likely just the power brick.