Buggered External La Cie Harddrive

[GLOC]

Well it appears that my drive is well and truly b*ggered. Wilbo and Garf ran some diagnostics using the Western Digital recovery/daignostic tool and nothing came back.

I then ran a hexdump program and I could see the folders and files there but do nothing about them. At least I know what files are on there now so can make a judgement call on the cost vs benefit of recovery.

So...does anyone know of 'relatively' cheap data recovery specialist? Looking at a single drive with 200Gb of data. Do they charge by the amount recovered or a flat rate for a drive?

Thanks

[Keiron]

Don't give up yet, if you can see the files then there is a variety of data recovery software that could potentially recover your data. Having a similar experience recently I'm not a huge fan of Recovery Pro anymore as it didn't recover anywhere near as much as other software. I can't remember off the top of my head what I actually did use in the end as I must have installed near on 20 different suites in a desperate attempt to get my images back.

As for recovery specialists you are looking for a base charge of 100-150GBP for what I imagine is pretty much what you can achieve at home. It then ramps up as the files get harder to recover, from the limited contact I had with them the maximum charge is near £400. There didn't seem to be a charge per GB recovered, just the amount of work needed to get to the files.

So, my advice is to go for a file recover program that checks for the particular filetype you have lost, in my case it was .CR2. They work by looking for particular hex codes at the file start, much like you looking via winhex etc. Did I get back what I lost? Nope, not all of it but I did get back the really important images that I wanted using shareware software readily available.

I'll try to dig out later what I used.

[GLOC]

Thanks for that Keiron. Recovery Pro didn't help at all really and when I did a full scan it said there wasn't any errors!!

As the stuff that I would want recovered would be business images, I can probably get that done against business costs anyway.

I'll wait and see what you can find first

[Steve Sub]

I've used Prosoft Data Rescue a couple of times to recover files from crashed disks (and deleted files, but that's another story ) very successfully on Macs, so I would give the PC version a try.
HTH
Steve