Hello,
I am a wedding photographer who has lost 1/2 of a wedding on a month old Seagate 1TB dual platter portable drive with 40gb of data on it. I have sent the drive to three places drivesavers, ontrack, & a local data repair company. I am aware the recovery percentage goes down with each company opening the drive. The drive has been deemed unrecoverable due to a "severe head crash". No attempt was made at a head swap or platter swap in each of the cases. I read here that the larger companies who receive a large amount of drives choose the drives that are the easiest to recover because they obviously make more money and don't want to spend valuable time on a drive for weeks or money swapping heads. I understand my drive may be unrecoverable. Do you experts feel that classifying the drive as "unrecoverable" is subjective? My client paid me $5000 to cover their wedding. I am willing to pay that much or more to get the files off the drive or honestly even 10 files off the drive. My entire business is on the line. I feel like I don't want to give up trying, but the stress of sending it out and get an "unrecoverable" result is overwhelming and maybe I should just face the fact the data is gone even if I was willing to pay a million dollars for it. If anyone is interested in helping, I would love to hear from you or if I should just let it go I am prepared for that also.

Thanks so much for reading this.

Hi, sorry to hear. Your camera memory card, any hope there? There are a number of individuals here that can do some pretty crazy stuff to get data back, but at a cost, and extent of damage. They will need to get your drive in to evaluate properly.

Yes, just because larger company say they cannot do it does not mean not possible. but drive needs to be seen 1st.

Be sure to implement a good backup solution going forward.

as SquaL said. Check you flash cards. Run a recovery sw scan on them and see what you can find. You may get lucky.

_________________
All went well until I plugged the drive in.

Thank you for your replies---- lesson learned. No excuse on my part for not backing up immediately. The half of the wedding I have is from utilizing several flash card recovery programs. I feel like I have exhausted that option. Some of the recovered CR2/Tiff files are corrupt after I via ontrack recovery software. The size is there (20mb a piece), I just can't open them (invalid file format, corrupt file, etc) Tried to repair them using various software (EXIF Edit, Tiff repair,) but just get a few lines of the top part of each photo with yellow/green/red banding. I tried using EXIF editor to copy metadata info from good CR2 files into the bad ones, but to no avail. However I am not a programmer so I don't know what the heck I am doing, and I would be willing to pay a professional to fix the corrupt CR2 files and Tiff files but can find someone who offers that service.

....and if not, we'd love to hear 'WHY' other companies claimed the drive unrecoverable.

Many pro's from this forum have recovered data which these companies you've mentioned have deemed 'unrecoverable' (me, amongst them). But this doesn't mean it is always this case.

I also suggest that if you decide to consult another pro, you should choose wisely. Changing "pro" hands on the drive can only make things worse, so the next pro should also be the last.

_________________
http://www.northwind.gr
SandForce SSD Recovery
Ransomware Reverse Engineering - NoMoreRansom! partners

Seagate data recovery deals with media damaged drives. I'd send it there as a last resort.

_________________
http://www.datasaversllc.com

In all three situations they have said:

"In our diagnosis we looked at the drive physically, mechanically, and structurally. This diagnosis determined that your drive had a severe head crash. This head crash caused severe physical damage to the platters in your drive and has left the drive unrecoverable."

I agree I need to choose any further companies wisely. I thought I was doing that, ontrack claimed hard drive recovery from the Challenger disaster and Drivesavers the World Trade Center. I was like heck they must be able to get data off my drive which had no physical trauma I was aware of (dropping, fire, water damage). Just stopped working and proceeded with the click of death.

Any recommendations are appreciated feel free to PM me if anyone is interested, or has recommendations.

I really appreciate you all taking the time to respond.

I am not sure of the protocol for asking for recommendations for repair companies on the forum so please let me know if I am violating any rules. I did not see anything in the forum rules.

@dcrouse111,

You're already receiving great comments from the DR pros (I'm not one, as I work elsewhere with data storage engineering), so I'll just add a few comments about the flash memory cards:


Personally I don't think that option is exhausted, especially if this becomes a "money no object" situation.


This is a typical result of a "raw" (file carving) recovery [FYI that term is nothing to do with the raw CR2 file format], and any "repair" attempt of the file will fail (as you have seen) if the "recovered" file was effectively garbage. Even I (as a non-DR pro) have managed to manually recover photos with similar issues for my family, which automated recovery software couldn't - so I'm sure some pros have similar (or better!) skills.

Therefore in parallel with investigating the options for recovery from the disk drive, I suggest you continue exploring the option for further recovery work on the flash media cards. To start with: How many cards did you use for the whole wedding? For each card - exactly what has happened since it contained the wedding photos e.g. just reformatted in-camera? Or did you select the in-camera "low-level format"? Or did you reformat in a PC (in which case, give Windows version & whether it was a quick or full format)? Has it been reused for other photos since then? Have you attempted recovery using Ontrack or other recovery software from each card? If so, did they all give at least some hint that photo data was on that card (e.g. corrupted photos was the best that could be recovered using that software)? That info will give readers some clues about the possibility of some recovery from those cards, although as always, an accurate diagnosis would need to be done by someone suitably experienced, with the cards in front of them.

P.S. When you were taking the wedding photos, did you delete images as you went along when you knew they weren't "keepers", or did you leave every photo on the cards as you took shots during the day? Also, I guess you were taking raw (CR2) photos, but just out of interest, were you taking raw+jpg or just raw?

Finally, I know it's obvious, but just to be clear - do not write to those flash memory cards from the wedding, any more than they already have been.

Good luck!

The key to recoverability of your hard drive is whether on not the service area (which holds critical drive info) is damaged beyond repair.

Check the summaries from the various DR companies you tried and see if that is mentioned. That's the critical issue, IMHO.

_________________
http://www.datasaversllc.com

Too bad they didn't supply a photo. We don't provide photos for every job, but generally do when the damage is as severe as they make it sound and/or when we are giving a second opinion. This way, if you were to choose to contact another lab, you could send the photo to see what their thoughts are before you waste time sending the drive.

_________________
Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Yep, we do that too!

_________________
PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

Us too, but only on cases with severe damage.

@dcrouse

You are not violating any forum rule by asking for pro recommendations.
I would recommend jono-ats and if he says so, you should send it over to Seagate as the last resort. There are some brilliant minds working at their recovery labs and with their equipment you *might* have some luck.

But before that, I suggest you let jono have a look. He will tell you exactly what's going on with your drive.

GOOD LUCK with whatever you decide.

_________________
http://www.northwind.gr
SandForce SSD Recovery
Ransomware Reverse Engineering - NoMoreRansom! partners

Our eval is free if you want to send it along. That doesn't change my recommendation about Seagate in this case.

_________________
http://www.datasaversllc.com

Don't use this software (ontrack recovery).
There are even freeware tools that do the job better.
PhotoRec - free and very, very good.
Try DMDE - commercial, but in free mode you can recover one file per click.

_________________
data recovery Poland

I wanted to give some conclusion to this discussion. I received this drive from the client yesterday and here is what i figured out about the drive. She gave me authorization to post about it

It had been to three different places before i saw it. Local IT company, Ontrack, and Drivesavers

The first place is the place i believe caused the drive to be unrecoverable, since i would like to think that Ontrack and Drivesavers would not do such awful job with this.

Company one is a local IT company near the client.

1. Top label was completely peeled off. It was a Seagate drive, but model number and p/n was unknown at this point.
2. 1tb drive, standard laptop size, 2 platters
3. Drive was missing Screw that held the heads in underneath.
4. Once the drive was opened, i noticed that the reading heads were mangled, but the way they were mangled was not done by the drive on failure. More likely they did not care when they put them back in.
5. Dust particles on the platters
6. Platter screw that holds the platters in place was loose, and a little stripped, the platters were not secured in, and moving independently.
7. There was a Sharpie mark on the edges of the two platters to most likely keep them in alignment when they were removed. They are were not even aligned with each other at this point. Sharpie marks not lined up.

I am assuming that drivesaver and Ontrack came up with the same conclusion and realized that since the platters were removed in non-aligned way they deemed it unrecoverable. it was not even put back together correctly to keep the platters from moving.

Send it to seagate.. Their lab is beyond amazing!

_________________
On a clear disk you can seek forever.

I've seen far too many disks get sent to an IT and "Consulting Services" and come back in worse shape then when sent in.

My last client sent her disk to the local computer store. The problem was simple. The encrypting bridgeboard had a busted connector. They tried soldering it and made a short which damaged other components. They threw away the board in an attempt to hide their cock-up. The excuse they gave was that it was a fire hazard and needed to be disposed of. Imagine that!

They "magically returned" all the parts when threatened with lawsuit. My forensics lab had repaired the connector, rerouted some traces and replaced some other misc parts. We had the disk running perfectly later that day.

I swear!!! Never take your disk to a computer store or consultant.

_________________
On a clear disk you can seek forever.

Sometimes a corrupt jpeg is the result of an "improperly formatted" or "mis-placed" pixel - to use layman's terms. Oftentimes one has to repair just 1 single pixel and the rest of the image magically appears. Done this a bazillion times.

Recently, I've been moving away from data recovery operations and instead focusing on preventing the problem in the first place. Several people have suggested following this -- http://dpbestflow.org/links/39 -- and variations on it for day to day backup operations.

_________________
On a clear disk you can seek forever.

Yep, seen many a similar case.

Often though they screw the drive up badly by taking it apart and so forth

_________________
PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!