I am new to this forum but thought you looked like you have the right kind of expertise to advise me on data recovery from a desktop hard drive which failed in 2008. i am just getting round to doing something about it now!! The repair guy reckoned the arm failed on the disc drive and that I would have to send it away to a specialist data recovery firm. When I contacted one they estimated the cost at between £500 and £700!!!!! Is there anywhere that might be cheaper??

Thanks
Jim

You get what you pay for. A good DR firm will have a good quality clean environment, good stock of good replacement parts, highly experienced recovery engineers, commercial and in-house tools etc. This is not cheap and in my opinion the price reflects this.

Sending your media to someone who offers lower prices could mean settling for less experienced engineers making repairs within a potentially non-clean environment with less than adequate tools.

This may not always be the case with firms offering cheaper services, but it is a risk that can be avoided.

Personally I think you will find it near impossible to get a good quality service for physical repairs anywhere for under £500

try PC Image on this forum.

Very much depends on the model of drive and what is ACTUALLY wrong with it.

The amount of times we have had drives in where a shop has said its one thing and it's turned out to be something completely different. They simply don't have the tools or knowledge to perform a proper diagnosis.

So what you've got a quote on is based on pure guesswork.

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PC Image Data Recovery
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Could you be more specific? What are the symptoms? Is the drive detected by BIOS? If so, what does BIOS report as its model number and capacity?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.