FireBrewer

Recipes 

Anyone have any experience with these?

WD Support > Data Recovery Partner

I have a WD 320GB external drive that bit the dust. Luckily, it's still under warranty but I have to shell out some coin to get the data back because of their ****ing defective product!

Now I really need a beer...

GilaMinumBeer

Recipes 

They are actually the Fed IT dept, they are scanning your data for security risks.

waterse

Recipes 

Well, with hard drives failure is not a question but a given. They must fail eventually, it's only a matter of when. Backups are critical.

GilaMinumBeer

Recipes 

I routinely backup my files. It's just all that pirated software I lose that really bites my arse. It took me forever to find a good keygen for CS2.

brewt00l

Recipes 

I'll just add that the one time we considered one of those services, it was rather expensive....the data basically has to be "mission critical" to warrant the cost.

malkore

Recipes 

Yeah, the price for recovery is pretty wicked. There's usually an up front cost just to assess the drive to see if its salvagable. then you get the real quote for the job.

talking to guys in IT, they say it starts at $500 and just skyrockets from there.

__________________
Malkore
Primary: English Mild
On tap: Pale Ale, Lancelot's Wheat, English Brown Ale, Steam Beer, HoovNuts IPA
Bottled: MOAM, Braggot, Raspberry Melomel, Merlot, Apfelwein, Pyment, Sweet mead, Cabernet
Gal in 2009: 27, Gal in 2010: 34, Gal in 2011: 13, Gal in 2012: 10

k1v1116

Recipes 

a lot of harddrive failures are recoverable without any special means. can you describe the problem,
does the system not recognize the drive at all when you plug it in?
does the drive make a ticking noise and refuse to open after a long wait from my computer?
sometimes the file system is simply corrupted and with some very basic software you can recover all your files and even save the drive, the mechanical parts of the drive can also be intact and the electronics maybe busted in which case you can get a controller board from an identical drive and fix it. while its not as common I recently recovered data from a external drive for which the disk was perfectly good but the electronics of the external case (what adapts the drive to USB/firewire etc) were busted.
when you plug the drive in what if anything shows up in the safely remove hardware program that should show up in the system tray.

mysteryberto

Recipes 

If it's an external HD consider taking apart if you feel comfortable. I've seen the HD inside the external shell come loose from it's cable. Fix is simply to plug it back in. More description of how it "Bit the dust"?

__________________
Primary: All grain pale ale, Pliny The Elder clone
Bottled:Double Noogie IPA, Amber Ale
Kegged: Brewcraft Dead Guy kit,Apfelwein, Raspberry wheat beer

zac

Recipes 

I'll be watching this thread. I have a few 1 terabyte external drives that I have info on. It;s not like you can just back them puppies up easily...

part time GIS guy, those SIDS are huge

billtzk

Recipes 

Get Knoppix and the Ultimate Boot CD. The former has a lot of linux tools that might be useful for data recovery. They are hard to glom for someone who is not familiar with Linux, though. The latter has a bunch of disk diagnostic tools. There are a few other Linux-based recovery CDs out there. SystemRescueCD is another one.

If you try to recover the data on your own, be prepared to spend countless hours at it, and accept the possibility of failure. I've had successes and failures over the years.

__________________
Reality is a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs. -Lily Tomlin