SWMBO's mac died yesterday-
Has anyone used a hard drive data recovery system to retrieve data- that's reliable with quick recoery time?
we have 1 estimate right now at $1200
thanks in adavance.
m
> SWMBO's mac died yesterday-
> Has anyone used a hard drive data recovery system to retrieve data- that's reliable with quick recoery time?
> we have 1 estimate right now at $1200
>
> thanks in adavance.
> m
Here's a do it yourself article:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/how-to/tips/4294038
And here is a relatively inexpensive piece of software you could try:
http://www.software-geek.com/datarecovery/mac-data-recovery.htm?gclid=CNOu8-2bhKwCFYpn5QodSDXgKA
It's been a decade since I've dealt with any data recovery companies, but the last quote I received stated that their fee remained the same even if they were unable to recover a single byte of data. I believe that was standard at the time.
My experience has been that due to frequency of access, the areas of the drive used for OS files tend to fail first. This usually results in a machine that won't boot due to damaged OS files, but the pics, docs, etc are usually okay. Using the info in Newton's first link I bet that you can DIY and save $1200. Worst case you spend a little time and then resort to the recovery company
Why would you need a data recovery company at all if that was true? All you'd need to do is put the drive into a working machine and mount the filesystem. How does the poster know the drive is "dead"? Does it spin up? Is it making grinding noises? Or does it just fail to boot Mac OS?
The best I have heard of is SpinRite. It is fairly cheap and recommended by most tech people. It used to be free if it did not work also, but I'm not sure anymore. Leo Laporte highly recommends it too (A tech podcaster).
Here is a link:
About a year ago my 250Gb Maxtor external hard drive that I used for backups died.
I got a quote from Seagate Recovery Services, evidently Maxtor was taken over by Seagate, to recover the data for $700 to $2500. I never used their service as most of the data was also backed up in other places.
You're correct.
Mechanical failure=Recovery company
File system error=DIY
My last "mechanical failure" was in 2000. It was a 4-drive raid array where the circuit boards on each of the four drives were fried when a power supply failed while in operation. Since then I've been involved with nine computers that "died". Data was recovered from eight by removing the HD and installing it as a second drive in a functioning machine. The ninth had damage to the file allocation table and required the use of an eighty dollar recovery software that I downloaded.
May want to try this:
USB 2.0 to IDE/SATA Cable Adapter
I bought one a year ago and have used it four or five times. Saves some time as you just connect to your old drive and plug into an USB port on another computer.
I've had something similar happen that also fried a circuit board on a hard drive. I tracked down the closest possible match as was possible, with the country and manufacturing date matching very close to my broken one, and bought it from a guy in Israel on Ebay. I was able to swap the circuit board and recover my data for $50. Most of the cost was shipping.
That sounds like the best solution so far! Thanks for the ideas. JRL
We considered going the same route. We were running four 10,000rpm scsi drives in a software raid managed by Windows NT server and backed-up nightly to a tape drive. Power supply failed and cooked everything but the network card. I spent eighteen hours straight gathering components and rebuilding/reloading the server only to discover that the tape drive had not been working properly. We were looking at two years of lost data. We got a quote from a data recovery company of about 20 grand - no guarantees. I forget which raid level we were using, but I believe we needed three of the drives operable to get the data back. Boss man at the time decided that it was a lost cause. We named it the Titanic Server - on paper it was redundant - in reality a hidden flaw sunk it like a rock.
I learned a lot of hard lessons that have stuck with me. Now I have nightly incremental back-ups to both an onsite Network Storage Device and an Online back-up service. I make manual back-ups to DVD every week to two weeks depending on the amount of new work I've done.
Thanks for all the replies- I've looked into them and will discuss them with her when I can get ahold of her tonight.
She said earlier today that she took it to the MAC doc and they triewd some stuff and couldn't get it going- said that they would have to " send the drive out to someone with a dry room." what ever that means. meanwhile- they are supposed to be putting a new HD in her mac book.
I have one of those also, VERY handy to have around the office. If the drive still powers up, you can turn ANY drive into a USB drive and just copy the data off. I have used it to easily transfer data from an old HD to a new one.
SHG
I used www.RescueMyData.com a few years ago (2007) on a smaller drive (20GB), and it was not nearly that expensive ($450).
But then again that was then. Also had to send them the drive to get their estimate but I see they do some online quotes.
As I recall the cost was not high if they failed. They shipped me back the data on DVD's along with the original drive.
- jerry
