Data recovery services

[Sam3]

Anyone here have any recommendations for a data recovery service? I lost my hard drive as I was getting ready to back it up and it has lots of music and photos that I'd like to get back.

I have a Maxtor drive that failed under warranty, and Seagate pointed me to a service (I think they own it) that estimated $1800 to clean-room recover the drive. I've done come Googling and I've seen prices as low as $695 to $1200 and more. These are clean-room places.

Stoopid, stoopid me...

[bazookaman]

have you tried Data Rescue

[Mr645]

If the drive wont spin up, your probably looking at $1000 or more. If it spins up then you may want to try utilities to recover any data. If there is any noise coming from the drive, I would not power it up at all if you want a chance of recovering the data

[hal]

I just heard that a friend of mine has set up an apple repair shop in berkeley,ca and is making a killing farming out data recovery at student discount pricing.

http://money.aol.com/news/articles/_a/ac...d156746765

call them and see if they can help

http://www.fixthatmac.com/contact.php

[Sam3]

The drive emits a clicking sound, I shut it down and took it out of it's case. I was going to try the freeze fix, but I've read that it is not always reliable and can damage the drive further because of condensation. I'll just have to find the money and get the data off it.

I learned that I should look for a place that is approved by Maxtor/Seagate so that I don't void the warranty.

[hal]

"I learned that I should look for a place that is approved by Maxtor/Seagate so that I don't void the warranty."

who cares about the warranty - the data is far more valuable than the drive.

[Sam3]

Why I mentioned the warranty is that if the drive is handled by an approved data recovery service, the warranty will be honored and you will get a replacement drive from the manufacturer. This is in addition to the data that gets recovered by the recovery service.

Hal, thanks for the tip, I'll call your friend Monday. I even have a student ID as work allows me to go back to school.

[space-time]

Sam3 wrote:
Why I mentioned the warranty is that if the drive is handled by an approved data recovery service, the warranty will be honored and you will get a replacement drive from the manufacturer. This is in addition to the data that gets recovered by the recovery service.
...

you are looking at a ~$1000 data recovery bill, and you are concerned with the warranty replacement where you might get a refurbished drive worth maybe $30 at best?

on top of that, do you really want another drive from the same manufacturer?

[Racer X]

over enough time, you will eventually get a bad drive from every manufacturer.

[space-time]

Racer X wrote:
over enough time, you will eventually get a bad drive from every manufacturer.

yeah, I agree, technically you are correct. But the gut feeling tells you to avoid that brand since you got burned once. And then you buy another, and another, until you're back where you started. But still I am curious if the OP would buy another drive from the same maker or would rather try another brand.