[prutz11]

My aunt's roof leaked all over her computer destroyed it. The hard drive is trashed and she needs the data that is on it (she never listened when I said back up)... She was quoted a price between 1500 and 3000 to rescue the data.

Has anyone had experience with this type of data restoration? What did you pay and who is best to use? Are there any tricks that might work for getting the data off the drive? Any software that might pull a rabbit out of a hat on the drive?

Thanks for the info

[gorickey]

I take it you have pulled the HD out and tried on another machine?

You must really, REALLY need that data to pay $3,000 for it...wow...

[romeosc]

Originally posted by prutz11:
My aunt's roof leaked all over her computer destroyed it. The hard drive is trashed and she needs the data that is on it (she never listened when I said back up)... She was quoted a price between 1500 and 3000 to rescue the data.

Has anyone had experience with this type of data restoration? What did you pay and who is best to use? Are there any tricks that might work for getting the data off the drive? Any software that might pull a rabbit out of a hat on the drive?

Thanks for the info

If you want to try it yourself, you might get lucky. My wife dropped her pismo in the whirpool, I imediately removed battery and hard drive and set on towels. I left it for 48 hours put in an external Firewire case and it was recognized and all data was retrieved. I was going to chunk it, but I reformated it and still use it 2 years later as an external to save mp3s. (NOT 1 DISK ERROR SINCE THEN) You might not be so lucky, but you might try!

[barbarian]

If the drive spins, Data Rescue can probably get the info off it...

This program has saved my behind several times even on drives that pro people said were "completely unrecoverable" and has saved me thousands of dollars. It has worked for me even on drives that sounded horrific.... Basically if the drive mechanism still works and the data exists data rescue can get it.

The only issue is that you will need to boot from another drive and have plenty of space on that drive to recover data to....

http://www.prosoftengineering.com/pr...ata_rescue.php


In your case with water the main concern is probably that the mechanism might be shot... in this case a pro place is probably the only way out.... But at least if this is the case the data is probably all there...

[prutz11]

Originally posted by barbarian:
If the drive spins, Data Rescue can probably get the info off it...

This program has saved my behind several times even on drives that pro people said were "completely unrecoverable" and has saved me thousands of dollars. It has worked for me even on drives that sounded horrific.... Basically if the drive mechanism still works and the data exists data rescue can get it.

The only issue is that you will need to boot from another drive and have plenty of space on that drive to recover data to....

http://www.prosoftengineering.com/pr...ata_rescue.php


In your case with water the main concern is probably that the mechanism might be shot... in this case a pro place is probably the only way out.... But at least if this is the case the data is probably all there...

Thanks for all the help everybody... Looks like she is going to have to drop the money... she has files on there that are just to important. I really dont understand why people don't back up!

[kessellc]

How about trying to find an identical hard drive and remove the circuit board which is probably the only part that is fried.

Check e-bay for a similar drive or your friendly computer repair person.

With a new board installed (which is easy to do) you might just be able to plug it in and retrieve the data.

Its a bit of a long shot but would certainly be cheaper than 1500 bucks.

Good luck,

Chris