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Well, it happened. 2 of my hard drives just died, including the one with all my pictures on it. Anyone know of a place I can try to get these recovered for not a lot of money? Took it to Geek Squad and he confirmed they were both dead and burning hot (I even burnt myself)
Depending on if the drive is still able to be recognized and run, you might be able to run some recovery software on it. If it's physically broken, which sounds like it is, since you mentioned it got hot enough to burn yourself, you may be SOL unless you find a lab that's able to open up the drive and read from the platters directly.
Also, in addition to backing up, I recommend monitoring the S.M.A.R.T. data of your drives with a tool like SpeedFan. The S.M.A.R.T. data was able to tell me that I had a remapped sector on my Western Digital Black HD even before there were any symptoms at all. Thankfully it was within warranty, and I got a new one from WD before I lost any data. I would DEFINITELY recommend checking S.M.A.R.T. especially if your HD is over four or five years old and runs a lot.
Like I stated in my PM, Drive Savers or OnTrack are the two I trust (and use) the most. Yes, expensive... we used them at work for official business. They also do forensics... worth every penny. Both have clean rooms and have highly technical skills to do the job required which is essentially taking your platters from an old enclosure and putting them in a new working enclosure. IF the platters are in good physical condition, you should be OK. If they are not, chances are the data is not gone but not retrievable.
The one place that can likely get it out even of the platters are bad are the NSA, the KGB (maybe not so much) or the Mossad. China's MSS does not have the skills but may have the tech. Iran's MOIS is said to be better than NSA although who really knows. :tongue:
P.S. If you have secret documents in those drives, I hear any of the above agencies will do the data recovery for free.
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