Dropped my 2.5external drive

If you registered the drive with the manufacturer like Seagate, then you could just have claimed against the warranty. I have read about a trick online where you can put the drive in a freezer overnight and plug it in to read some of your data, but that once the drive heats up, you will have trouble reading, so you'll have to repeat the freezer part until most of your data is off the drive and then you can just throw it in the trash afterwards. But, yes, if the "data" was just mostly porno, then you can try these steps instead of paying money for data recovery.
 
genetic said:
You have to pay to get your data back. If you don't like their terms then go somewhere else and pay more.

Data recovery isn't cheap.

I've used Southbit before and I can highly recommend them. We had one instance where they couldn't retrieve data and had to pay to get the drive back. It's their time you're paying for.
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Not going out to nail Southbit as all data recovery company will have that policy, I am just trying to play the odds in my mind if it's worth it..

Let say Joe Soap start a data recovery company. Software corruption is easy as he just need to use special software to repair the drive.

Hardware. If the head is stuck against the platter, motor is working and the platter is not damaged you could try the youtube trick. If the platter is scratched by the head then from what I understand the disk is ruined.

If the circuitboard failed then you can order the same harrdrive and swap the circuitboard for the exact same make and model which is difficult to source. That is where a policy of keeping of all harddrives will be an advantage. You can just use the circuitboard of another customer disk to get the data if you have a policy of not returning disks to customers.
Having a policy of beating all quotes, investing in SEO and adwords will soon result in you having a large collection of drives

I think data recovery companies provide a great service especially with diagnosing problem. Especially recovering from RAID array etc but in my case I know what the problem is and it's a 2.5" compared to a 3.5" is much easier to open and access the heads basically just unscrew like the video that backstreet boy posted.

Playing the odds there is maybe a 7/10 chance the disk is scratched.1/10 chance the motor is seized and the platters need to be swapped. 1/10 chance the head is stuck and can be resolved with the trick but has a 50/50 risk by render the drive inoperable or scratched the disk.

As a curious person by nature I would like to understand or even see so I can learn something but to pay R150 to get a report saying platter was scratched or motor damaged and pay another R450 to get the contaminated back compared to me opening it up and learning something might not be worthwhile.

There are harddrive problems that are easy to resolve. Like putting the disk in an external and doing a software disk repair up to more difficult operations one can't really choose a company if you don't know some answers to questions.
Like
Do they have specialized equipment to move a stuck head.
Do the company swap platters and if they do they have one in stock of the same drive make and model and release version or order a new one.
How many times have they successfully done platter swaps for 2.5" drives.

How about posting a pic of your clean room on your website
 
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skimread said:
How about posting a pic of your clean room on your website
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Very few data recovery companies have iso rated clean rooms as it's not required, a flow bench is more than enough and is what most companies use.
 
ponder said:
Very few data recovery companies have iso rated clean rooms as it's not required, a flow bench is more than enough and is what most companies use.
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She me a pic of a spindle removed or some equipment then. I want to know my harddrive will not just be a donation to their circuit board collection.
 
OP, do you service your car yourself? It's also something one can do DIY and save a lot of money on labour and parts markup.

The point is that you pay someone with experience to do a proper job which translates to peace of mind, more time to do other things, and clean hands...

skimread said:
If the circuitboard failed then you can order the same harrdrive and swap the circuitboard for the exact same make and model which is difficult to source. That is where a policy of keeping of all harddrives will be an advantage. You can just use the circuitboard of another customer disk to get the data if you have a policy of not returning disks to customers.
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This is just not true, perhaps it was true for drives from around around 10 years ago. You cannot simply swap a PCB for a matching one from a matching drive, the drive will still fail to initialise.

Never go full retard.

Edit:

With regards to parts, it is standard policy in the industry the world over to keep the faulty drive. There is no ready market for hard drive parts, like there is for cars or computers. Parts to recover one's drive come from another person's drive. If rare, one has to sit on eBay finding a correct match and import. Hanging onto parts is a very important aspect of data recovery, and there is no malice behind it.

At the end of the day, SouthBit has a 5 star rating with close to 60 reviews on their Facebook and Google+ pages. They are active on the forum and have put a helluva lot of time into hard drive information on their website for the benefit of the consumer.
 
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skimread said:
I feel so stupid. While using my drive in the laptop on my bed I got out of bed and accidentally pulled the charger cable and dropped my 2.5" drive on carpet about a fall of 50cm and when it hit the floor it was still plugged in reading and writing to the disk.

Now the drive just makes beep type noises. About 30 in total. Ten a second before it does anything.
I assume the head is buggered and/or the motor is dead
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I had a similar experience about 3 years ago so I know how k@k this feels.

Nevertheless it was a hard learned-lesson and since then I've kept independent backups of all my important/sentimental data.
 
The trick is that you unscrew the hard drive and align the heads by hands. Everything should work after that
 
There's a very good reason that a hard drive should never be opened in anything other than the correct environment. Look at this image and then you'll see what the smallest contaminent will do at 5,400 or 7,200 RPM.

http://www.seagate.com/www-content/ti-dm/_shared/images/ti-transitionadvanced-fig6-600x293.jpg

As I always say, if the data is not of much worth (not worth the cost of recovery) then by all means, have a look at some Youtube vids and try some DIY. Just remember, as soon as you do this you've probably ruined all chances of a successful recovery.

If the drive is beeping the heads are most likely stuck to the platters like this:

https://www.facebook.com/Southbit/p...5375989875165/584319444980818/?type=1&theater

Either that or the motor spindle is seized, very unlikely though. Sure, you could open it up and move the heads off and try to power off the drive. However, firstly you'll contaminate the drive. Second, it's very easy to damage the heads whilst removing them and placing them back on the parking ramp. Thirdly, the area where the heads were stuck will most likely be unreadable. So when you power the drive up, the heads will probably be damaged and the drive might click. You've got contamination so if the heads come into contact with this you'll get a head crash, media (platter) damage and your drive is destroyed. If you avoid all of this, the drive probably won't mount anyway as it will be unstable. There is a lot more to just unsticking the heads in a case of stiction, a proper DR hardware imager is required first and foremost.

Also, our R450 cost to receive your faulty HDD back after a failed recovery is fair considering the time we have put in. I know another company who will charge R850 ex VAT for this same thing.
 
skimread said:
I feel so stupid. While using my drive in the laptop on my bed I got out of bed and accidentally pulled the charger cable and dropped my 2.5" drive on carpet about a fall of 50cm and when it hit the floor it was still plugged in reading and writing to the disk.

Now the drive just makes beep type noises. About 30 in total. Ten a second before it does anything.
I assume the head is buggered and/or the motor is dead

Is there anyway for me to get my data form a company without costing an arm and a leg?


[video=youtube;sThtf740LPo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sThtf740LPo[/video]
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I feel your pain. My girl friend dropped my 6 month old 3TB about 2 years ago. It died... The clicking noises sounded painful.
Hope you can recover your data, without losing to much $$$.
 
Shake the drive while its powered on. The drive will be readable if you're lucky.
I've done this with 3.5inch drives that were not readable and was able to recover about 80% of the data.
 
I've taken it to a place and pulled the trigger and accepted the quote to be recovered.
Initial diagnostic is head and motor not responding. The disk doesn't spin up so that was a given.

Now just the wait.
 
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