Hi Shane, Well, the first thing you could consider, is that no matter where you send it, seeing how it is an external drive, they are going to open up that case and take out the drive.
They will put the drive into one of their own machines... And it may power up and be fine. At which point they will offer (or automatically) copy all of the files over to a new drive and charge you for the "recovery" the price of the new drive and cost of transferring files over. Hard drive prices are at a premium right now because of Asian Tsunami's so get ready to pay a great deal. My first suggestion would be to pop open the drive yourself and take the hard drive out. You could either put it into another enclosure, or put it into a machine and see if it fires up. If so, problem, solved, no money spent. A lot of times these drives may just need to but in a machine with a different interface. If you can see the drive, but files are corrupted, you are in a good place, it means stuff can be recovered. You could try some recovery software and see how far it gets you. If you can't access the drive, but the computer recognizes it as a drive, you are still doing much better, as at least it knows it is there... This you could google to find out what to do, but at the very least now you'd starting thinking about the Rescue Centres. And in this case, you know it isn't bricked. If you pop the drive in an nothing happens, it doesn't spin, it doesn't show up... Well, you might be in it for the long haul, lots of cash, and perhaps no return... Yikes! But this is far down the list. Also, if you know what kind of drive is inside, that could change your chances of success... An IDE drive is much older, and generally are all ready to kick it... But I have found putting it into a different machine actually give it enough life to get the files off... Which happened, and then it was gone. SATA is much more reliable, and you have a better chance of it just being a communication issue, and perhaps not anything wrong with the drive, so that bodes well. Long story short, open it up, see what you have and find an enclosure/other machine to test it out in. Best of luck, Deco On 2/25/12 8:57 AM, "Shane Eason" <[email protected]> wrote: > FW Gang: Has anyone recently used a data recovery center, such as The Data > Rescue Center in Livermore, CA? I have an external drive that's completely > crashed. No software that I have access to will solve the problem. I think it > could be mechanical. Anyway, from what I hear, I should look at spending a lot > to recover the drive, which blows! So any advice/solution would be great! As > you may guess, I haven't backed up the drive and there's a lot of film/video > projects on it. > Thanks! Shane _______________________________________________ FrameWorks > mailing > list [email protected] https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listi > nfo/frameworks www.decodawson.com _______________________________________________ FrameWorks mailing list [email protected] https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
