Hard Drive Recovery

Hard Drive Recovery

What is Data Recovery?
Data recovery is a process of rescuing data from damaged, failed, sabotaged, or inaccessible data storage media when all normal means of data access have been exhausted.

How to Avoid Data Disaster?

Every data storage device is bound to fail at some point in time without exception. The best way to overcome or avoid consequences of such unpleasant incidents is to have a back up system in place, where one could backup important data quite regularly. There are tons of options available as far as onsite or offsite data backup solutions are concerned. A quick search about “Data Backup” using Google or any other major search engine can generate good number of leads.

What are the Symptoms / Reasons of a Data Device Failure?

Your data device might be showing some of the symptoms listed below. Or, you might already know what reasons are making the data inaccessible. This can be due to physical damage to the storage device or logical corruption to the file system or operating system preventing device from being accessible by the host operating system or computer BIOS. Below, we have listed many of them.

Clicking sound heard from device
Hard disk drive not spinning up
Electronics controller card is damaged
Smoke was observed / smelled
Device firmware has become corrupt
Hard disk drive components failure
Fire or water damage
Media surface contamination / damage
Inaccessible drives / partitions
Virus attack has corrupted the file system
Accidentally deleted files / directories
Accidental reformatting of partitions
Missing or deleted partitions
Applications are unable to run or load data
Computer won't boot
Computer has blue screen
RAID controller failure
RAID configuration lost
Accidental reconfiguration and initialization of RAID array
Multiple drives failure of a RAID array
RAID partition missing
Water damaged tapes
Broken tapes
Tape backup failures
Overwritten tapes

What are My Data Recovery Options?

Disk Doctors has been a leader in providing data recovery services and software to end users, corporate, and government sectors. So when individuals and enterprise users need a reliable, fast, technologically advanced, and yet affordable data recovery services; they have chosen “Disk Doctors” repeatedly, as our services and success rate has been second to none.
If your device has displayed any of the symptoms listed above, then you may consider any of the following recommendations.

DIY (Do It Yourself):

If one is technically savvy and comfortable in handling the data storage devices, and sure about physical fitness of their data storage device, then they can download demo versions of Disk Doctors’ award winning data recovery software to determine whether the issue could be addressed using a recovery utility before spending money to purchase the software. If this helps, then more power to you.
Note: We do not recommend this solution to most; as we have observed the situations getting out of hand while attempting DIY quite often mostly due to inexperience. And often destroying any chances of future recovery attempts.

Get Professional Help:
If your data is important, then seeking professional help is a must regardless of the condition of data storage media. Professional help includes only well established and reputed data recovery companies with a proven track record.
Taking your disk drive to a computer store for data recovery equates asking a nurse for brain surgery; as 99% of the computer stores’ recovery capabilities are quite limited as data recovery services is not their core business.

How Much Data Recovery Would Cost?
Single Hard Drive: The recovery cost for a single hard disk drive can run a wide range (anything from $350 to $3000 depending upon the nature of problem). It is not possible for us to provide an exact recovery cost without diagnosing the data storage media. The best thing would be bringing or shipping the problem drive to our lab. We will perform a free evaluation of your device and give you an exact dollar quote based on the challenge on hand. The diagnosis process takes 2-6 hours and is performed as soon as we receive the faulty data storage media. So, we prefer to offer free diagnosis (a saving of $150) before we give you a no-obligation firm recovery quote. At that time, you can decide whether to go ahead with the recovery process or decline it. Upon your quote approval, we will try to fix the drive problems, recover the data, and a list of files and directories of recovered data will be emailed to you for verification. The recovery cost is independent of the size of recovered data. No recovery results in zero charge except return shipping.
RAID Array: The minimum recovery cost for a RAID array starts at $1500 for a mirror set. For other RAID types the cost to recover a RAID greatly depends upon the number of disks in the array, RAID array type, individual disk size, number of failed disks in an array, along with many other variables that factor in while determining the cost to recover a failed RAID array system. We strongly recommend getting in touch with one of our certified RAID experts to share the details of your failed RAID array in order to find out a ball park figure. An exact quote can be furnished only after thorough analysis of your failed RAID array in one of our labs.
Tape Backup: There is a non refundable $150 fee for tape analysis applicable towards tape recovery or tape conversion service. Tape recovery cost varies a lot depending upon tape type and nature of the issues with tape backup. An exact recovery quote can be provided only after scanning the tape media.