Damaged 250GB Hard Drive - Affordable Recovery?

[Sawtooth811]

I've had this 250GB hard drive for nearly three years, and it had short-circuited PCB and heads back in January 2010. Does anyone know of any affordable Data Recovery facilities that can recover the data from this hard drive?

I'm looking in a rage between $400 - $600. If it is at all possible to find any that is more inexpensive, which is probably extremely rare, that would be even better.

Thanks!

 

[Macman45]

You could try Disk Warrior before resorting to a third party...If you do go to a data recovery company, they are going to charge you a lot. DW has had results in recovering data, but only from drives that will still "Come to life"

 

[juanm]

Try to find the exact same model on eBay, and swap the PCBs. I've seen HDDs come back to life this way. For the price, it's worth a try. Good luck.

 

[Makosuke]

Data Rescue 3 is much better for salvaging data from badly messed-up drives than Disk Warrior, but I think it's safe to say that if the PCB fried neither one is going to do you any good at all.

If professional data recovery is prohibitively expensive (the range of a couple thousand dollars is what I've heard thrown around in the past), your one other option would be to find another drive with the exact same part number (model, size, revision) and try doing a PCB swap. I wouldn't get my hopes up, but I've heard people claim it's worked for them a couple of times. If the heads are fried that's obviously useless, though.

 

[Sawtooth811]

I apologize, but I forgot to mention that I tried replacing BOTH the heads AND the PCB two years ago, TWICE with no success. I also blew a little over $60 by destroying two identical Hitachi drives while trying to get this one hard drive to work (which really wasn't bad for two perfectly-working 2.5" 250GB SATA drives at the time).

Also, the first thing I always do, no mater what, is check a damaged hardware component any safe way I can before taking it apart, so possibly, my only option right now is finding a data recovery facility.

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(the range of a couple thousand dollars is what I've heard thrown around in the past)

Geek Squad currently charges well over $1600+ for my problem, which is absolutely outlandish.

To be honest, I'm looking for something under $900 now, because that's the highest rate I saw two years ago when I got a well-described quote (I don't remember where though, unfortunately). It must be the employee's direct paycheck to charge $1600+ for data recovery.

 

[Macman45]

It's a pretty involved process....They have to do it platter by platter, dust free conditions etc. If the data is worth that much to you, then go for an expert, you will probably only get one chance at it. Once those platters are removed the folks doing the job have REALLY got to know their stuff.

 

[niksimpsons]

Re:

I think this is a physical case and it needs a data recovery service which will help you to recover your data. The data recover service provider must have a class 100 clean room and a dust free environment so that your data can be recovered perfectly..

 

[Sawtooth811]

I know this thread is half-past dead, but I shipped the drive to a data recovery facility back in May, if I recall correctly, and they said they cannot recover any data on the drive, so I told them to destroy it; However, I'm happy without the data to this day.

Thanks everyone for your help!