Hey all, I am new here so be easy on me I am a longtime business IT professional who has done data recovery on drives but never one with mechanical errors. I have had luck with the freezer trick one time in my life! I was completely shocked!

Anyways I have a friend who gave me a hard drive in which she thinks may have been dropped, it is full of pictures and of course no backups!! I took a video of the drive once I plug it into my PC it makes some funky noises, curious if someone here might be able to lead me down the right path to recovery based off of the noise it's making. Windows recognizes something is plugged in but nothing shows in the drive manager. This was one of the WD portable drives, I cracked open the case and was going to plug the drive into the my SATA dock but found it doesn't even have a SATA interface it is direct USB 3.0.

Anyways here is the link to the video, any advice would be greatly appreciated!

http://tinypic.com/r/35jmnhs/8

It sounds like stuck heads, at the very least. It likely is an easy recovery by a professional lab, if you don't mess with it.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Would you have a estimated cost a place would charge for something like this?

What's your budget?

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Here in our Providence, RI lab we charge $450-$650 for the recovery plus the cost of parts if needed. Really just depends on whether the read/write heads need to be replaced, or survive the unstuck procedure.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

Assuming we can free up the heads without needing to replace them, we charge $350 CAD for stuck head recoveries 2TB and smaller.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

It is a friend of mine, I am not sure what she is willing to spend. I just want to point her in the right direction and give her a round about idea of what it would cost.