Unfortunately my Laptop Hard Drive has crashed. Its a 2.5 inch Western Digital Scorpio Blue 250GB drive.
I am going to need the services of a Data Recovery Company and hoping that someone can recommend. Seems to be an expensive service and a number of rogue companies around, so anyone with personal experience of this situation able to recommend a reputable company much appreciated.
Please private message me if this is something you would rather not place on a public forum.
Thanks
Rob
I’ve had a lot of personal experience with data recovery, but not any data recovery companies because I do my own attempts and if it fails it’s likely the data is gone for good.
That said there is GRC | Hard drive data recovery software (which I’ve not tried because of expense vs loss in my case, but GRC are very reputable) but will attempt to hammer every sector of the drive to get the data off it.
But before you go spending an excess of money, the free options usually work well and you may as well try them before such things as SpinRite.
So, the main two questions are:
Was the drive still detected by the laptops BIOS/UEFI and just wouldn’t boot the OS/gave I/O errors or was it not detected at all on boot?
Do you have access to another computer (doesn’t matter if its a PC or a Mac provided its x86)?
If you answer yes to those then the easiest (and cheapest) recovery option is to try it yourself first, using TestDisk/PhotoRec TestDisk - CGSecurity and a SATA to USB adaptor.
You can plug the drive into the other computer and then set it to restore specific file types (Photorec) or the entire drive/partition (TestDisk) to either the free space on the computer you’re using, or a USB thumb drive / HDD.
Do you need to recover data on the drive or do you just want to get up and running again ?
Hope you manage to get your data back.
I would recommend getting an external USB drive and doing regular backups.
I had this problem in that my PC boot hard drive failed. I bought a new drive, replaced the failed drive and reinstalled Windows. I then bought a USB drive case, fitted the failed drive and was able to see the data files on the failed drive and recover them.
Had a similiar problem some time ago with a Sony Vaio. Just plugging the old hard drive into another machine via an adaptor allowed me to read some of the data and transfer it onto the new machine. I managed to extract almost everything I needed including photos and some Office files. A replacement HDD and new windows install and the old laptop was back in use again as a spare machine. At least worth a try. Best of luck!
Appreciate the replies guys but unfortunately in my case attempts using the methods mentioned and one or two others besides have not worked and have compromised the situation further. Add to that a poor backup strategy with data that really needs to be recovered.
The laptop took a knock and the drive immediately failed and would not boot back up. I have another similar laptop with a similar hard drive, so used that with a USB disk reader to try to resolve the situation. Disk not seen at all, so I took the cover off to see what was happening. Disk spinning to start but no movement of the parked actuator. I tried reseating the PCB as the contacts that feed the actuator did not look that healthy. Disk then appeared after a while but just a drive letter and a progressive green bar on explorer that would get to about 98% and then stall. I decided to check the actuator contacts on the top side where the ribbon cable is fitted and somehow moved the actuator onto the edge of the platter. Tried to gently move it back but failed as apparently locked. There is only one platter on this WD2500BEVT Scorpio Blue drive but as I understand it, removal/replacement of the actuator requires special tools that are available but hugely expensive.
I believe the main issue is damage to actuator and/or PCB to actuator contacts. I could potentially provide a twin hard disk as a donor for parts. As I understand it Platter and at least one IC on the PCB are inextricably paired.
I assume that A Bona Fide data recovery company will have the facility to physically repair the disc and hopefully get my data back. I accept this will cost me an arm and a leg but would really only want to pay significant money if the data, photos, etc could be recovered.
You also really do need to store that external hard drive in a physically separate location. Otherwise there are a whole host of possible events (theft/fire/flood/etc) which could mean that you could irretrievably lose all of your data.
All of my data (including photographs, music and documents) is backed up onto three separate external drives, at least one of which is always in a separate location. You can pick up a 5Tb drive for well under £100 these days, so there’s no excuse for not doing it.
(Cloud backup is another option, but I’m personally not a fan. Apart from the - significant - privacy implications, you are effective trusting your data to be stored on somebody else’s computer. There have been enough high-profile failures for that to concern me.)
It’s a long shot, but based on my own experiences with WD drives they can be a bit tempermental when it comes to the power from a USB port, and it’s possible that the laptop USB ports aren’t quite cutting it power-wise presuming your adaptor wasn’t already externally powered.
So, one thing (straw clutching) that might kick it back into shape is if you plug it into a wall socket using a modern (2A) USB phone charger. Downside of course with this suggestion is you’ll have to hot unplug it from the wall with no safe way of ejecting it.
An alternative would be a desktop PC with USB 3.0 ports.
That’s when I personally would have ditched Windows and booted a linux live usb/cd up and then tried testdisk/photorec since you’d got it to the point of being half-accessible, again though that description is identical to an underpowered WD drive as well as a failed drive.
Ask your friendly local council if you can put it in their documents safe - it’ll be in a (literally) bomb proof location that way 
I back up to DVDs but even that hasn’t stopped media degrading over the years. Some of my floppy disks failed too ! 
I believe that some of the data recovery people will give you a no data no fee guarantee, probably worth ringing round a few to see what sort of response you get. I don’t have any experience of this in the UK but my son in the USA had a similiar problem with a Mac some years ago and was quoted over $1000 for a full data recovery, and that was in Silicon Valley where there are lots of one man computer people…He just wrote off all the stuff he had on that drive.
You might also have reduced your chances of anybody being interested with the DIY work - I do hope not! Best of luck …
Yes, I have made a number of key mistakes here and am prepared to pay $1000 to get my data back.
I believe the issue is essentially physical actuator/reader arm or associated contacts requiring special tools to remove/replace. I can supply a donor drive for these parts, if required.
I accept that I have been an idiot here in a number of aspects but please read the initial post.
Can anyone recommend a good Data Recovery company who has a chance of digging me out of this to some extent. If they recover my data I am prepared to pay. The problem is that the human condition has attracted some really greedy useless companies into this particular area, so a personal recommendation based on experience would be gratefully received.
Just had this company recommended.
it’s a one man band but with a very good reputation. Nothing wrong with that:-)
Hopefully he can help; will report back.
Good to hear you’ve had a recommendation and I hope it all works out for you.
I did have one final thought to this, in that WD might have (and as it turned out has) its own list of recommended recovery services, with their closest being Epsom:
https://support-en.wd.com/app/datarecovery?selregion=WD_EMEA
Thanks for this.
I had heard of OnTrack in a positive way and they appear to be the only Data Recovery service recommended by WD who have an office in the UK.
I do not think they could possibly get involved or refer to a small outfit like Cheadle Data Recovery with one man and no US operation.
Will call on Monday; hoping that I will be able to temporarily fit another unpaired but similar PCB to attempt repositioning of the Actuator, prior to despatch. I believe it is the contacts on the PCB that feed the actuator that are the problem, so mechanical. Cheadle offer a no recovery, no fee but only where the drive has not been opened. If it has been opened as in my case £80 + VAT charge payable if no data recovered which sounds fair to me.
Feeling a lot more positive now and looking forward to a chat with Dr. John Reid from CDR on Monday with luck.
Reporting back after a wholly positive experience…
I have been dealing with Dr. John Reid from CDR, Cheadle Data Recovery for quite some time but now in receipt of Recovery Data from my crashed and damaged hard disk.
Opening the drive, as I did was a huge mistake and the platter surface damage that occurred probably resulted from that. John sent me photographic evidence but to be honest I was not at all surprised. Platter damage has two effects, limiting recovery through corruption but also very rapidly degrading donor parts used for recovery. The heads need a smooth clean platter surface to operate effectively and damage, dust, etc basically wears them very quickly.
I was proactive with this process and supplied a disk for donor recovery parts as well as another for return of recovery media. John basically used my parts until they wore out and then after consultation as to success/failure focussed on remaining important damaged files with another set of recovery parts.
Communication was excellent throughout and it was so good to have a working file and damaged file structure to look at after the first pass. Sounds strange I know but having a file structure was very important to me regardless of what was working or damaged. John managed to recover a number of important files that had appeared damaged on the first pass. The main loss was photos with most of the damaged ones showing nothing or just a thumbnail with very limited expansion. Damaged word files usually produced no data at all.
I cannot recommend Dr. John Reid of Cheadle Data Recovery highly enough.
Please learn a lesson, if required, from my experience. Take regular backups and should the worst happen to your hard drive, do NOT open it or trust it to anyone other than John Reid.
When you’ve spent ages getting things organised, the last thing you want is everything all jumbled together in one giant mess 
I’ve found an odd thing about damaged files such as images, sometimes your web browser can load them while an image viewer cannot, just in case you have the corrupt files and want to give it a try.
I see he also does SSDs etc. so that makes him very useful to know for people with more modern drives and data loss issues. Just figured I’d add that.
Good to hear it all went well for you, I actually knew of a company that folded due to drive data loss (mind you, they weren’t willing to pay much for the recovery), I realise you could say the data was beyond value, but would you say he also did reasonable rates for the recovery?
I’d say so, yes and a lot more to this than I thought. This was a professional service with regular communication from the start.
This is never going to be cheap. I had to pay an upfront fee, non returnable of £96 because the drive had been opened. Opened drives are automatically classed as physically damaged, so donor parts required for any diagnosis. There is no upfront fee for drives that are not physically damaged.
A file structure for recovered and damaged files is then made available and the choice not to go ahead with recovery. At this stage an undamaged Hard Drive can simply be returned for £8.39 as I understand it; same would apply for the physically damaged drive but £96 upfront charge not refundable.
At this stage I was given the opportunity to request another effort at a reasonable number of damaged files before any further money paid. Not sure if this was because I supplied the initial donor parts so the second set needed for this subsequent recovery may normally cost extra. This secondary recovery process went very well and I was happy with the final result. I paid £418.80 for the recovery and £8.39 for next day courier return of recovery media. I had supplied a Hard Drive for recovery media so no charge. Obviously if John supplied a Hard Drive for recovery data, that would incur additional cost.
Total price paid to CDR was £523.19
The donor drive and recovery media drive I supplied were very cheap purchases, both fully checked(Chkdsk) before being sent out. The drives concerned were simple WD 250GB but I think the fees are similar up to 1TB.
Certainly sounds competetively priced for the service you’ve detailed.