Does anyone know of a local company who does data recovery from dead hard drives? Thanks in advance

There is a place in Rotherham, but I can't think of the name at the minute.

ontrak (not local) have a website, might give you an idea of the pricing (more than a decent backup strategy).

Originally posted by Cyclone
ontrak (not local) have a website, might give you an idea of the pricing (more than a decent backup strategy).

My client thought they were backing up, but it would seem they weren't being succesfully done for about three months.

Originally posted by markwit
My client thought they were backing up, but it would seem they weren't being succesfully done for about three months.

yep, often the case, regular testing of the restore procedure is part of a good backup plan.

Is the harddrive completely dead (ie no spin up) or is it just unreadable.

Ontrak provide some sort of online/phone service. You connect the drive as a 2nd drive to a pc, download their software, then dial into a specific number. They remotely use the software to perform a recovery for you whilst co-ordinating on the phone with you.
It helps if you have an idea of directory structure/file names and types that need recovering.
If it's not spinning up then it needs to be sent off to them.

ontraq are good - they do all our company's computer stuff - based in essex

Just phoned Ontrack. Seem very good. Upto the client now if they want to spend up to £900. BTW, the drive is dead - not recognised on system. Spins but no head a activity. Thanks for you feedback.

how much are they?

i did recovery for about 3 months at one of my previous employers and was pretty successful.

i used RunTimes Get Data Back, would this be worth a try?

Ontrack are pretty well reccomended in the industry, one of my clients had a UPS fry, which wiped out a 15 disk RAID5 array, whilst tehy were waiting for a new tape drive to be delivered, so no backup. :( Ontrack had to pull the platters out one by one to pull the data off, cost nearly £5000 in total, but really it was peanuts for the company concerned. And they managed to extract the data, and ship it back to us on a brand new set of disks within a fortnight. Bargain IMO.

Joel

Put all the options to my client, and have gone for CBL, an International company with a base in Newcastle. They offer free diagnosis, and reckon the cost will be £350 to £900 with a 3-5 day turn around. They do offer a 48 hour turnaround for £900 to £1800. Will let you know how I get on if you like.

I work in this industry and Ontrack are one of our clients and probably the best of the data recovery companies. They actually strip disk drives down in a clean room and replace parts and heads to get customer data off. Often the client recieves his data back on a series of CDs.

Many other companies claim to recover data but all they do is try to swap the drive's PCB with an identical one ( it has to be exactly the same drive, same rev level, same firmware etc.. )And see if that repairs it. If that doesn't work they sub contract a full data recovery job to Ontrack or one of the other data recovery companies.

The main problem facing jobs like these is sourcing an identcal drive, and we help in ringing up companies all over the world to try and find matching drives to ones which are in for repair. Ontrack really know what they are doing however and always ask for only the relevent details, other companies ask for lots of detail about the recovery drive which isn't neccesary because they don't have the same knowledge base.

I would try Unirecovery.co.uk, they have done two seperate jobs to our full satisfaction after the drive started making clicking noise.theyhave replaced the head and we had all of our data.

Blimy witpucks. You do like dragging up old threads :) Anyway, I did use CBL in the end and the did a 100% succesful recovery for my client.