Does anybody know of a reliable and cheap place to fix/recover external hard drives?
I recently was in the process of backing up my Maxtor hard drive and midway through it dismounted itself and won't remount. I'm hoping it's just a power supply issue or something, but I know very little about it. Does anybody know a reliable place to take it to get it either fixed or get the data recovered? I'm an unpaid intern, so a CHEAP place would be ideal!
Thanks,
Dave Hagen
Thanks,
Dave Hagen
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Mike Porter on -
Call me. I can verify whether it is a bad drive, enclosure, or power supply. The last two are easy to deal with. The first one is a different matter.
Mike Porter
480-6965
Convergent Computer Services
BTW - I was the product manager for the Quantegy line of Black Diamond hard drives.
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Permalink Reply by Jason Killebrew on -
Oh. I feel for you brother. :)
Not too long ago I had my external die on me. This was actually my backup drive. My internal hard drive had just crashed on me about 3 weeks earlier. Needless to say, I hadn't copied everything from my backup drive back to my new internal drive.
When my external crashed, I lost several Pro Tools sessions for clients and my entire Itunes Library. (about 6000 songs) Not a good day in the Killebrew household. :)
Oh...and did I mention that I was working with a client that had a deadline in 3 days? Sooo...I had no choice but to get my drive repaired...and FAST!
After doing some research online I realized it was NOT going to be a cheap thing to get the data off of my drive. BUT, I had to have it. Finally, I found DriveSavers. I contacted them and their customer service department was great. They gave me an estimate of about $1500. THEN, I told them I needed it back ASAP. That really screwed me up!
All in all...The data recovery costed me $3500 plus overnight shipping to get the drive there ASAP as well as overnight SATURDAY DELIVERY to get the drive back! (Total was about $4000).
Then, naturally I had to buy a couple extra externals to make up for the one I lost.
**LESSON LEARNED** - RAID RAID RAID! NO more sessions without MULTIPLE backups!
Jason
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Permalink Reply by Chip Karpells on
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tekserve (www.tekserve.com) in nyc, about half the cost of drivesavers... i'd give the utility diskwarrior by alsoft a try first though.
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Permalink Reply by Jeff Gibson on -
There is a company up in Madison, WI called Gillware, Inc. http://www.gillware.com/
They were able to get the data off of a 80gig hard drive that came out of a Dell laptop. Ended up costing us somewhere around 400.00. (Not 4000.00, but 400.00) They shipped all our data back on a set of DVD's. We told them to trash the drive, but they would have sent that back too if we would have wanted it.
The best thing about them is they don't charge you anything for an estimate. We actually had a set of RAID drives go south on us. They couldn't get any data off those (probably because we messed around with them here before shipping them off to them). Once they let us know they couldn't get anything off of them they packed them up and shipped them right back to us. Didn't charge us a dime. In fact, if their able to get your data, you can actually get online and see the file names before you pay them anything either.
Hope this helps. Good luck!
Jeff Gibson
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Permalink Reply by Anthony Johnson on -
I've been through this several times with people for many reasons ranging from accidents to power failures to just plain oopsy. Almost everytime, it's just a corrupted directory. If you can power on the drive and hear it spin up, then it's not the power supply. If this is a Mac and you can get a copy of DiscWarrior, it will attempt to straighten things out. I can't promise a miracle, and if it IS mechanical failure it won't solve anything. But for a corrupted directory, I've done this several times for people and studios.
If it doesn't spin up, no power light, etc, then you "might" have a bad power supply. Take out the drive and put it in another box. But honestly, I'm betting the directory is corrupted.
I see Mike Porter's offer above. I have every confidence he can get you going or steer you in the right direction. But if for some reason you need to, you can drop me a PM and I'll be glad to offer assistance too.
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Permalink Reply by Claire Ratliff-Sears on
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If you're still fighting this battle, call Tommy Wolisin with NetWorks ... a computer genuis and all around great guy.
615-586-8778
Tell him I sent you.
Claire Ratliff-Sears
Laughing Penguin Publicity
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Permalink Reply by Todd Robbins on -
put it in the freezer long enough to get the drive down around 40 - 50 deg. (and I'm talking the drive itself, not the external case / enclosure). Pull it out of the freezer, plug it in, and if it mounts then start copying as fast as you can!
It's worked for me...
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Permalink Reply by Dave Hagen on -
wild, I would have never thought of that.
On a similar note, you can boil a crushed ping pong ball to get it to expand back into shape...
Also, thanks to everyone for your responses. I solved the problem by getting a new enclosure for my drive.
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