My Hard drive crashed and I tried what I can but things are not
looking good. What I want to know now is of numerous hard drive repair
service companies in the UK, who I should go to. The web pages don't
really tell how much and even though I could get quotes from various
places, it's a time consuming process. Plus I would know nothing about
them apart from what they say about themselves. I would like to know
people's experiences with hard drive reparir service companies in the
UK especially:
1. The condition of the damage
2. Which service they used
3. How much data they got back
4. How much money they paid
I am interested to know people's experiences, maybe those on blogs,
forums, personal web pages, and anything else that helps me to
identify the best place I should go to to get my data back at the most
reasonable price. Of course
this is depenent on the condition of the drive and I'm interested in
the experience that relates to me the most. So in the following, I
summarise 1. how it happened, 2. current condition of the drive and 3.
What I have tried.
1. How it happened
I was a Windows user but I used iTunes to organize my mp3. These mp3's
(~120GB) were on this USB external disk of 250GB. Recently I bought
MacBook and I started moving everything into that environment. Of
course I cannot move all my mp3's to the laptop (nor I need to) but I
would have to import (not copy) these mp3's to the MacBook's iTunes so
I can play them. So I started importing by specifying the directory
which contained all the mp3's and it was a very slow process taking
hours. For some reason I really had to disconnect the external drive
but iTunes is not responding. I wanted to cancel the operation but it
is almost hung and I decided to kill the process. From here is a vague
memory but either having unmounted the drive properly or not, I
disconnected the drive and did what I had to do. Next time I tried to
use it, I was in trouble.
2. Current condition of the drive
The drive is spinning, it sounds like normal as well. When I connect
it to my MacBook, nothing appears so I tried my old windows machine.
Now this machine finds one partition of the drive which is 35MB or
something really small like that. I don't even remember creating such
a partition (I remember creating one or two partition but not the
details) but it contains some directories. I didn't look further
afraid of making further damage.
3. What I've done to try and recover the data on the disk is to run
ddrescue on it. I hooked the disk up to a linux machine, I could see
lot's of errors in mounting the disk but eventually it mounted the
partition. I was hoping the rest of the disk is also visible but that
was the only thing. ddrescue does robust reconstruction of the data on
the disk but it really didn't do much failing to reconstruct stuff in
the small partition that was visible, the rest of the drive seems
completely untouchable... |
