External Hard Drive Recovery

winslow

Anyone know a company that can recover files/thousands of photos from an external hard drive that was dropped? Or is it impossible to recover?

Foques

it is more than possible to recover.
What was the heights it dropped from?
How bad is the damage?

When you connect your drive to the computer, what happens? Do you hear clicking noises? Do you hear disks spinning at all?

winslow

It fell about 2 feet..on tile...when I plug it in to my computer I do hear a humming sound. I can't seem to find it when I plug it in..it usually pops up on my screen.

winslow

I should of had everything backed up!

Foques

where are you located?

There are a few solutions I can see..
You can go through a data recovery company. That may cost ya. quite a bit too. (When I worked in a tech support for one of the large retailers, we would charge 200$ per GB, and that was cheap)

or you can go on.. say.. ebay.. and look for a external enclosure (should be around 15$).. Then, take a part your external drive, take out the actual HDD and put it in to the new external enclosure. All in all, should take you about 10 minutes to do (or if you are familiar with computers, you can just connect it directly).
8 out 10 external drives that I saw fail, would fail due to their interface, not due to the HDD itself.

winslow

I am in Charlotte, NC....I will check out the external enclosure solution. Maybe, I can recover it myself or get someone locally to help..without going to a data recovery company. Thank you for your time and leading me in the right direction for recovering my photos!

ziggy53

I moved this to the Digital Darkroom Gear forum, where we discuss computers and hard drives, etc.

ziggy53

I agree with Arseny about trying the external controller first. If that does not work do a Google for the following terms:

hard drive recovery service

CynthiaM

winslow wrote: »

Anyone know a company that can recover files/thousands of photos from an external hard drive that was dropped? Or is it impossible to recover?

If you are not that comfortable with the notion of taking out the drive and putting it in an external enclosure, if you were to take it to a Best Buy, that is essentially what they would do and I'm sure if you bought a replacement drive there, if they can get the data off of your damaged drive, then they should be able to dump it onto the new one. My daughter did that; they got the data off and onto dvds.

ian408

If you have ClickAway, they do data recovery. I haven't used them but i'd suggest not taking the drive apart unless you can do it in a clean environment. The last thing you want to do is repair the drive and have to repair it again because there's dust in places it shouldn't be

RogersDA

winslow wrote: »

I am in Charlotte, NC....I will check out the external enclosure solution. Maybe, I can recover it myself or get someone locally to help..without going to a data recovery company. Thank you for your time and leading me in the right direction for recovering my photos!

Give Andy's favorite Tallyn's a ring:

http://www.tallyns.com/datarecovery.htm

ChatKat

Ppa
PPA recommends Drivesavers.com

I had a partitioned RAID hard drive that an idiot tech unpartitioned. Then I had a power surge and the computer wouldn't recognize the drive. I had backups of the RAW Files but not all the finished files - only some of them.
I sent the drive to them, they recovered the drives and put the info on a new drive. They will quote you a price before they work on the drive.
I got all my data back.

1-800-440-1904