OMG! My harddrive stopped working and I lost all my stuff! What data retrieval company should I call for help?
January 20th, 2010
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Author: I am like balling my eyes out cause I had so many pictures of my family
and I and so many important school files that I hadn’t backed up before my
harddrive stopped working! I took it to the computer tech at Best Buy and he
said it looks like the files are on the drive but he can’t get them for me.
He said I should look to a data retrieval company to help me but he said it could be pricey. OMG! I’m sooo sick over this and I am praying I can get all
my stuff back. I live in Richmond, IN and I wanted to know if there are any harddrive specialists in IN, or OH that could help me or somewhere else I could send my harddrive to.
Please help! I’ve never felt so bad in my life. I feel like all my memories have just died!! All my pictures of my dogs and my friends and my family are all gone. And all my important school documents are lost!!! I need help.
I feel so bad. I feel like a looser because I didn’t back up my harddrive sooner.
I can’t stop crying
It was a dell home computer.
I was the IDE driver. The error that
came up was something like
IDE driver error.
I didn’t have a battery backup and the electric just shut off. When I turned my computer back on the
harddrive was dead.
The computer tech tried hooking my harddrive to his computer but he still couldn’t retrieve the files.
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The fact that the Best Buy tech says he can see the files is a good thing. That means that the drive is mechanically sound and it should not be too difficult to get the files off.
Since he told you to go somewhere else to get the data, that is exactly what you should do. The tech at Best buy has the tools needed to do exactly what you want to do. It just sounds to me like he was too lazy to do it for you.
Any repair shop will have data recovery programs, take it to some other repair shop and tell them you want the data recovered. You should expect to pay ~ $120 for the data.
I would like to stress that the less the drive is powered on, the better chance you will have to get the data off it.
Also, let this be a good learning experience and back up everything that is important to you on multiple sources. In other words, back them up on to CD or DVD and also back them up on an external drive.
unless you are willing to pay a few hundred bucks for those files. then you are in help. if not, there isn’t much you can really do with a dead hard drive. my only question i got for you is, does the hard drives still works. if so, then you can get yourself another computer and run it on linux to get all of your files back.
What type of system? Desktop? Laptop? IDE? Sata?
What do you mean it stopped? Does the system boot at all?
I would try bestbuy, I think they do that…I have done that on a couple of laptop hard drives, and I always freeze them in a airtight ziplock bag for 24 hours and then try accessing the documents after that….if that doesnt work I would send it to best buy or a data recovery place, you can ussually find them in the phonebook in the yellow pages!
There is a 50 50 chance the retrieval company to work for that amount of money.
For a start the minimum recovery charge is about $1000.00 and that is with no guarantee. You could try fitting the hard drive as a second drive to your machine, assumiong you have a replacement drive fitted and may be able to copy them accross. If you succeed in any way, buy yourself an external usb hard drive to use as backup from now on.
Your in luck because your in the middle of a few large cities. You should go to your library & look at the yellow pages for those cities or do a google search like the one I posted below. You will need to explain in detail what happened & see who can help you. Though sometimes a harddrive is unrecoverable no matter what you do to it.
Good luck!