Looney Labs Geeks Mailing list Archive

Re: [Geeks] another question from Kristin...

  • FromBrian Campbell <lambda@xxxxxxx>
  • DateTue, 8 May 2007 12:05:46 -0400
On May 7, 2007, at 8:58 PM, Kristin wrote:

are any of our geeks knowledgeable on the subject of hard drive data recovery?

as you may have seen Andy quote under his Thought Residue this week:
<http://wunderland.com/WhatsOld/2007/WN.05.03.07.html>

"I'm riding on several bummers right now: 1) The hard drive where I keep all my video files stopped working (and I may have lost forever the high rez versions of a few of my recent movies)."

He sent the drive to Seagate, and they want $2350 to recover it!

We need the data...  do I just pay it?
They've got me right where they want me...

Any advice or suggestions?

I can't tell you how much a chance they have of recovering your data. I would recommend that if the data really is that valuable to you, you send it straight to them rather than trying to use free or commercial data recovery software. The software method can generally recover data if it's just a corrupted volume, but if it's a misaligned head, trying to read it can gouge the disk and lose what data is there. If the data isn't worth that much money, then you can always try the software approach, but you ought to be aware of the risk.