Data Recovery in Londres

February 8, 2006 5:51 AM

I need to find people who can recover data from a broken hard-drive (featured previously here) I am in London (London, England that is) but Googling brings up such an array of hits I don't know how to choose.

Has anyone else in London had success with a particular outfit?

posted by Kiwi to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Sorry, not to answer your question directly but you do know that harddrive recovery is very expensive? I've heard good things about DriveSavers and they appear very reputable. Purely anecdotal, but when I took my broken drive into a local place they charged me $300, could get nothing out of it and wanted to charge another $5000+ to get it into the clean room. I understand that hard drive recovery is very expensive, but I was totally naive and they didn't tell me that there could be additional charges and I thought the 95% or whatever success rate was the lower charge. Be careful if you go to a local company without a recommendation.
posted by geoff. at 8:18 AM on February 8, 2006

We've used Vogon for drive recovery before - they were excellent and managed to retrieve data which we thought was long gone. The cost was around £3,500 for two drives, though this was 2/3 years ago. Don't know whether prices would have increased or decreased in that period.

Looking at the previous thread, did you try putting the drive into a new enclosure? That would be my first step.
posted by blag at 9:10 AM on February 8, 2006

Response by poster: Wow, £3,500! No wonder they call themselves Vogon.

How would one go about putting the drive in a new enclosure? It is a self-contained external unit; are there people in London who could do this for me?

In the meantime I'll see if the Vogons can do a quote for me.
posted by Kiwi at 10:29 AM on February 8, 2006

What's the make and model of the external drive? Is it 2.5 or 3.5"? If you don't know, tell me the dimensions and I can probably guess.
posted by blag at 11:12 AM on February 8, 2006

If Vogon's quote is too steep, for you, Retrodata is regularly recommended on Usenet as a cheap(er) alternative to the big name recovery sites based in England. Several endorsements from happy users, and a(the?) principal is active in hardware discussions there. Several levels of recovery with clear pricing guidelines.

After getting an exorbitant Ontrack quote for data recovery, I think Retrodata might have been the one UK company I seriously considered shipping from the USA to based on what people had said about them, but it's been long enough ago I honestly can't say who the candidate was. I didn't personally use Retrodata, anyway.
posted by mdevore at 12:04 PM on February 8, 2006

Pretty much any local PC shop or self-respecting geek should be able to move the hard drive to a different external unit with no trouble whatsoever - the case is normally just held together with a few screws, and the drive is connected with just one cable (if it's a 2.5" unit - small enough to fit in a pocket).

But depending on the kind of hardware problem, and value of the hard drive contents, it might be better to not do any attempts of hardware-shuffling and just leave it to the professionals.
posted by ckemp at 2:13 PM on February 8, 2006

Response by poster: mdevore, Retrodata do look promising.

blag, the HD is a Fujitsu MHT2060AH.
posted by Kiwi at 2:27 PM on February 8, 2006

OK, that's a 2.5" laptop drive. This is a replacement caddy for the drive for £7. The transfer process should take about 5 minutes: unscrew the screws holding the old caddy together, slide out the drive and unplug the connector from the end. Gently plug the drive into the new caddy's connector, slide it into the new enclosure and screw it together. Job done.

It's probably the simplest PC repair job you'll ever do but, as ckemp says, you may want to take it to a local PC shop and get them to do it if you're nervous.
posted by blag at 2:50 PM on February 8, 2006

Response by poster: OK, thanks. Will try that.
posted by Kiwi at 3:28 PM on February 8, 2006

Response by poster: Well I tried replacing the caddy, and you're right! Piece of cake! Still, unfortunately it didn't fix the problem.

So, its off to Retrodata. Fingers crossed.
posted by Kiwi at 1:19 PM on February 15, 2006