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So my hard drive may be completely fucked. I can't boot up the computer, the drive makes loud clicking sounds when I turn the computer on, etc. I'm a university student, so I sent the computer to our tech support people in the hope that they could recover some files. They couldn't.

I'm not sure if there's anyone who can fix this, but I'd like to try, because otherwise I'll lose years' worth of files. Has anyone ever used a service to repair hard drives or recover data from a damaged hard drive? If so, how much did it cost you, and were you satisfied with it?

I haven't used one, but there are companies that handle this sort of data recovery; it generally involves disassembling the drive in a clean room. It is quite expensive and will probably cost at least several hundred dollars. You'd have to call them for a quote to get a more precise estimate.

I have a friend whose ex systematically destroyed every copy of his doctoral dissertation, and he said it cost him several thousand dollars (3k I think? this was a while back) to have restored. But he got it back and said it was worth every penny, especially as she eventually had to pay for it. From everything I have heard, you are looking at anywhere from 500 to several thousand dollars for a professional data retrieval service to restore a harddrive.

IIRC most places will give you free quotes.

You can try sealing the HDD in a bag and sticking it in the freezer. People report mixed results with this method.
It may not work at all, or it may give you a few minutes to a couple of hours of time to pull the most essential files.

The clicking is the HDD attempting to resynch the armature with the platters repeatedly, and failing. It's usually either a mechanical failure of the arm itself (freezing can help with this scenario), or the data on the disk is bad (freezing will not help here)

If the drive hasn't been nuked, the data can be recovered. Problem is, are you ready to pay? There are specialist firms that deal in data recovery, but they are not cheap. You might need to fork out a couple thousand grand depending on the extent of damage.

Yeah, you're fucked. I got an estimate on recovering a bad hard drive once. They wanted $1200. Nothing on there was that important.

Try sticking it in the freezer. Sometimes that'll get a hard drive to work again for a little while. It's not a permanent solution, but if you have a ready means of backup you might be able to save some things. And in the future, keep backups.

Data recovery programs are normally very time consuming to run, which is one of the reasons why people will charge you an arm and a leg to do it. They also only work for certain problems; if the drive has physical internal damage then much more expensive measures are required to remove the disks and fit them into a new drive prior to attempting recover. If you pay a professional you are looking at a couple dollars as a bare minimal, but they ought to give you a free quote. The hardware swapping or recovery of data that was actually overwritten is what can run into the thousands. You are not certain to have to pay 1 grand or 3 grand or anything like that. However bad noises is a bad sign.

However you might also just try asking around with your friends. Data recovery programs are not necessarily very hard to use, and someone you know might have one and be willing to try to help. The costs are high because of time consumption and well... they charge what people will pay!

I dunno about this freezer idea. I can see how that might work by shrinking stuff that is rubbing apart, but be careful about warming the thing up too quickly afterwords. Not something I am familiar with.

$500 or more is out of my price range. *sigh* There's stuff on there that has sentimental value to me, and other stuff that is useful, but it isn't that important.

I'll try this freezer trick--I guess it can't make things any worse, can it? I don't expect it to be usable for long, but with any luck it'll give me time to back up my most important folders to my external hard drive.

Destructionator XIII wrote:When you freeze something, you generally want to keep it in the bag while it thaws out. Otherwise, water will condense on the device itself. If it is in the bag, water will stick to the outside of the bag instead, and the air inside the bag stays the same before and after.

Do you mean that I am supposed to freeze it and let it thaw before trying to boot it up? I mean, I can't very well boot up my computer if the hard drive is in a plastic bag. Have I misunderstood you?

Metatwaddle wrote:$500 or more is out of my price range. *sigh* There's stuff on there that has sentimental value to me, and other stuff that is useful, but it isn't that important.

I'll try this freezer trick--I guess it can't make things any worse, can it? I don't expect it to be usable for long, but with any luck it'll give me time to back up my most important folders to my external hard drive.

Destructionator XIII wrote:When you freeze something, you generally want to keep it in the bag while it thaws out. Otherwise, water will condense on the device itself. If it is in the bag, water will stick to the outside of the bag instead, and the air inside the bag stays the same before and after.

Do you mean that I am supposed to freeze it and let it thaw before trying to boot it up? I mean, I can't very well boot up my computer if the hard drive is in a plastic bag. Have I misunderstood you?

Put the thing in plastic bag, in the freezer and once it's frozen, out of the bag, into the machine and see if it boots up.

You can probably google for more detailed instructions by people who have done it and know all the factors involved.

It's fucked anyway, so it's not like you're going to risk fucking it up any further are you?

I'm sure you're already kicking yourself enough already, but I will just add that this is why backing up is so important.

After my laptop was stolen by the TSA I was right and royally pissed. Not because my government had stolen from me (well I was angry about that), but because I'd lost years of writing, background material, my very detailed resume, lots of photos, etc.

In my case, there was nothing I could do because I didn't have a backup.

Now I backup nightly to a file server. Whatever happens, I'm sure you'll be doing something similar from now on too. I would recommend an off-site backup service like Carbonite. They are quite reasonably priced, and you'll never have to worry about your backup burning up along with your laptop in the fire or anything like that.

As to your particular problem, I would recommend purchasing a new hard drive and installing the OS onto it, and then trying to mount the damaged HD as a slave drive to see if you can get any data off of it. The noises probably mean it'll have trouble mounting no matter what, but it's worth a shot before you go for the freezer method, and you're going to need a new hard drive anyway.

Metatwaddle wrote:Do you mean that I am supposed to freeze it and let it thaw before trying to boot it up? I mean, I can't very well boot up my computer if the hard drive is in a plastic bag. Have I misunderstood you?

No, when you take it out of the freezer, you need to immediately put it into a computer and start copying files off. As it warms up it will be more and more likely to fail again.

Sea Skimmer wrote:Data recovery programs are normally very time consuming to run, which is one of the reasons why people will charge you an arm and a leg to do it. They also only work for certain problems; if the drive has physical internal damage then much more expensive measures are required to remove the disks and fit them into a new drive prior to attempting recover. If you pay a professional you are looking at a couple dollars as a bare minimal, but they ought to give you a free quote. The hardware swapping or recovery of data that was actually overwritten is what can run into the thousands. You are not certain to have to pay 1 grand or 3 grand or anything like that. However bad noises is a bad sign.

Data recovery software is almost certainly not going to be able to resolve a hardware failure - that's more useful in the event of "oh shit I hit 'delete' on these documents labeled important_fiscal_documents" or "a virus hosed the filesystem" or even "fuck, we deleted some documents and some of them even got overwritten, but even getting fragments back is worth thousands of dollars".

As a tangent, there are also two general kinds of hardware failure on a hard drive. One involves the electromechanical bits inside the drive itself - that's where you run into the multi-thousand dollar "take it to a Clean Room and transplant the platter spindle" servers - and the other involves a failure on the electronic control board, where you basically just need a replacement board from a drive, although the real difficulty and expense there lies in getting a board of the same manufacturer, model, and often even the exact same firmware.

eion wrote:I'm sure you're already kicking yourself enough already, but I will just add that this is why backing up is so important.

After my laptop was stolen by the TSA I was right and royally pissed. Not because my government had stolen from me (well I was angry about that), but because I'd lost years of writing, background material, my very detailed resume, lots of photos, etc.

In my case, there was nothing I could do because I didn't have a backup.

Jesus Christ, can't you, you know, call the police and tell them your laptop was stolen from you?

The law doesn't consider it theft when the TSA does it. They are the only organization in the country that is allowed to conduct warrantless searches and seizures and to "deprive [you] of ... property, without due process of law;"

It's blatantly unconstitutional of course but there's nothing he can do, especially since our Supreme Court has been stacked with authoritarians who would almost certainly say it was legal.

Stofsk wrote:Jesus Christ, can't you, you know, call the police and tell them your laptop was stolen from you?

As it was taken by the TSA (Transportation Security Administration, in case you didn't know), the police won't be able to do much. As it was likely not stolen in the "legal" sense of the word. It was merely "confiscated" for whatever reasons the screeners may or may not have had at the time.

At least if he was bringing it with him as a carry on. If it was in checked baggage, it probably was simply stolen.

In any case, AFAIK, there's not much the police can do about it.

That's fucking ludicrous.

Stofsk wrote:That's fucking ludicrous.

Well, I was wrong about one thing: TSA screeners stealing stuff can and do get arrested for it.

As far as something being carried on getting confiscated at the security checkpoint, I don't know how that gets handled.

Stofsk wrote:That's fucking ludicrous.

The TSA is probably the biggest criminal agency in the country. I've related horror stories while on government travel with these assholes, and Thanas can relate stories about TSA goons ripping about colonial-era Spanish documents because they were in envelopes.

It was taken out of checked luggage.

Back in the good old days I used to fly with my laptop checked all the time and never had any problems. I had just finished a 3 week business trip and I just wanted to lighten my load and sleep on the plane, so I checked my laptop bag.

BIG MISTAKE

I spent an hour yelling at the airline and the TSA rep to no avail, but I did learn a valuable lesson I suppose.

Since then I don't check anything I don't mind having stolen.

Tolya wrote:If the drive hasn't been nuked, the data can be recovered. Problem is, are you ready to pay? There are specialist firms that deal in data recovery, but they are not cheap. You might need to fork out a couple thousand grand depending on the extent of damage.

Sea Skimmer wrote:Data recovery programs are normally very time consuming to run, which is one of the reasons why people will charge you an arm and a leg to do it. They also only work for certain problems; if the drive has physical internal damage then much more expensive measures are required to remove the disks and fit them into a new drive prior to attempting recover. If you pay a professional you are looking at a couple dollars as a bare minimal...

Pretty wide range for costs there, heh.

Well, I have a similar issue with a fairly new drive (ironically after I accidentally busted the original and got a replacement). The freezing idea sounds worth a shot, so I'm glad I checked this thread.

I had a drive bork on me last year when I was building my new computer, ironically I'd just transferred a load of files onto it for safe keeping so I could format the other drives.
I found a nice sturdy plastic bag to put the drive in and squeezed out as much air as possible prior to sealing it, then popped it in the freezer for a few hours.
Made sure that the computer was working fine & that I had enough spare storage capacity for the contents of the frozen drive, hooked up an external enclosure and tested it with another drive and I was all set.
Retrieved deep frozen drive and plugged it straight into the enclosure, powered it up and to my delight the platters spun up and the computer recognised the drive. Wasted no time at all transferring as much as I could before the drive warmed up.
I got about 90% of the entire contents before it died for good.

Admiral Valdemar wrote:Pretty wide range for costs there, heh.

A few years ago my uncle's company had a corrupted drive. It was the drive that stored all the invoicing data and it wasn't backed up. They went to a specialist and had to fork out about 8 thousand polish zloties, which is around 2600 dollars. I imagine that prices went up from that time, if only due to inflation.