Well my hard drive is crashed. Badly crashed. Not something any of the local mini-shops can handle, I need to send it into a professional service, with lab and clean room and such. Does anybody know one?
How important is the data? They charge by the megabyte and can easily run into the thousands of USD.
The lowest price I ever heard of for a lab data recovery of a really broken HDD was around 1000 USD and the price was from Taiwan I think. Forgot where. Really consider if re-installing, fishing for backups or just losing the data and redoing stuff will not be better than paying up. And I sympathize.
I’m not sure how damaged is your HDD, but if you are not ready to pay a lab, I could try to help you as I’ve recovered few times some hard-drives for friends with some tools on Linux such as Testdisk for example. But me, I cannot guarantee anything.
In that case, the first thing you will need to do is to buy another hard drive at same or bigger size. And we will need to copy block per block your damaged HDD to the new one, in order to work only on the new one (Safer, will not damaged further)
But Lab will be the best of course.
I’ve already done testdisk and photorec, it definitely needs to be sent to a lab. But it’s a logical recovery for sure, which is cheaper. Nobody has ever done this?
There’s a company in Neihu called Linwei Technology that handles professional HDD recovery. I had a 1TB Western Digital drive mechanically crash a few months old. Cost me around $20,000 to get 99% of the data recovered from. I had personal stuff on there of nostalgic and sentimental value, so I had to pay the piper. Since then I have learned my lesson and have a daily automatic online backup plan in place.
If its nothing important I’d just learn the lesson and junk it… HDD recovery is expensive no matter what.