Anyone know about hard drive recovery?
 

One of mine crashed recently. Sent it to a local place with a clean room and they said it was non-recoverable even after they replaced certain parts.

It made loud clicking noises when it died.

Should I seek a 2nd opinion or is this the end of the line?

Just find one of the guys on the TV show. They will just type like mad on the keyboard and never hit enter, space and never ever backspace or touch the mouse and recover data on a hard drive that had bullet holes.

It can get real expensive to try data recovery on a drive with the click of death. Good luck.

I know we're talking $1k and up...But as it stands I have about 4 years of pictures that are unaccounted for.

I've managed to find 16 of 20 years of photos on that hard drive.

Oh man, I feel for ya. Photos are so important to me now and I know I don't do a good enough job of backing them up.

Go here, identify the sound then report back.

Failing hard drive sounds - Datacent.com - Datacent

You mean like wipe it...with a cloth?

I could always download most of these from Facebook...But the quality won't be as good as the original files.

I honestly thought I backed them up better than I did.

"Drive makes scraping noises and spins down. The internal headstack is damaged." That's what Data Analyzers told me.

If the heads are trashed that typically means it suffered a head crash.

Head crashes are kind of like golf swings, they make divots in the platter.

Sounds like they told you the heads are dragging on the platter, if that's the case stick a fork in it.

There's an old analogy, a drive head floating over a platter is like flying a jet at mach3 1 inch of the ground.

Things get real ugly real fast when something goes wrong.

I had a hard drive crash once and lost a lot of pictures of the kids for a period of time. Tried to get it recovered, but it was a no go.

Still have the hard drive in case some new technique is developed to recover them.

A real data recover center should be able to pull the disk(s) and unless the surface has been physically scrapped or gouged then they can get the info. The noise you heard is the "click of death" and I would guess they tried replacing the circuit board and that nearly never helps fix the issue.

Way back in 1993, when I was the staff IT director at COMNAVAIRPAC in San Diego we had a financial PC get the dreaded click and we had our contractors try to recover it and finally went to Disk Doctor in San Diego who was just starting out. They pulled the disk platters and recovered all the spreadsheets. It was NOT cheap and in the end we installed several dozen backup drives and also setup network based backups and never had another issue.

Is there a good place to send them for recovery ?

The place I used was Cherry Systems (or similar name in Marietta/Atlanta).

I did a check and Disk Doctor is in several cities now and they will at least talk to you on the phone, or they used to? The best one of their centers is still the San Diego area office from what my sources tell me. Good luck

Contact the FBI, they have just had lots of practice on Hillary's server drives!

If all else fails, try to find an expert that does forensic data recovery. These guys have special tools and methods to recover data from wiped drives. You may be able to get a referral to one from a private investigator, or from the forensic accounting department of one of the big accounting firms.

Good luck.