Hard Drive Data Recovery

[SJN-Fox]

Mrs SJN's laptop has gone tits up! It doesn't find the HDD when rebooting and it's not detected in the BIOS either. I've removed the drive and put it into a USB caddy and tried it in another computer where it's not detected there either. I suspect that the drive is not spinning up and therefore fahooked.

My question is, has anyone used a data recovery company to retieve data from a dead drive? If so, can you recommend a good one that's not too expensive. Ordinarily I wouldn't bother but she has a load of music files on there as well as several gigs of pictures that are irreplaceable.

All (sensible) contributions gratefully accepted.

 

[SJN-Fox]

Ok, update time, just tried a different caddy on a different workstation and it appears in windows explorer but when double clicking give the error below.

 

[bocadillo]

Ok, update time, just tried a different caddy on a different workstation and it appears in windows explorer but when double clicking give the error below.

View attachment 7795

Have you looked at the drive in Device Manager (Control Panel/System/Device Manager) to see if there any clues there? You may be able to enable it from there.

 

[SJN-Fox]

Have you looked at the drive in Device Manager (Control Panel/System/Device Manager) to see if there any clues there? You may be able to enable it from there.

Yep, tried that Bob and it doesn't show up, also tried looking at it on a Linux system but it doesn't show there either.

 

[Durham Fox]

Have you tried to view the HDD in Disk Management?

 

[SJN-Fox]

Have you tried to view the HDD in Disk Management?

Yep. Tried that and it doesn't show up.