but you are in the UK? I am in California USA.

DHL/FedEx ship to UK, so do USPS

If you'd rather keep it in USA then there are several members of this forum who would be perfectly able to assist you. (E.g. Jono-ats, Quasimodo)

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No judging or anything:
Purely out of curiosity in understanding your interpretation of data recovery service worthiness, how much do you think in your opinion it is fare to pay for a complete data recovery service in your case in the Unites States where the deliverable for the service is a brand new device containing all of your recovered data? And why if you would like to explain briefly?

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

$1,400 and no guarantee? Wow, I charge $350 (when converted from South African currency) and on a 'no recovery no charge basis. I know I'm cheap, but $1,400 no matter what the outcome is.... extortion.

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$1400 for no daters? That would be simply criminal.
Don't think the OP interpreted that correctly.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

I think I did not explain myself clearly.

They wanted USD200/nonrefundable deposit. Then, they will attempt to extract the data but not guarantee. However, the cost would be USD1400 if they are able to recover the data but however much the percentage is IS NOT guarantee. I can choose not to pay them USD1400 if they extract 1% and walk away with no data (not even the 1%) and no pay. But if I want the 1% data, then pay up.

So basically I would pay them to attempt to recover the data. I cannot get whatever data they recover until I pay up even if it is a small percentage. Small percent or big percentage, it is still my data and they are precious data to me. This industry is new for me but apparently what they say make sense as an industry as a whole. I called a lot of companies and they seem to operate in similar manners.

Are you sure that they said you would have to pay $1400 for 1% AND NOT some reduced quote (let's say $400) for that 1%?

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

The service fee is not actually the percentage of data but rather their labors. Actually, a lot of company would even stop attempting to extract data if it falls below certain percentage.

I should probably understand their perspective in this reasoning but as a data owner, data is precious regardless of the percentage. So I do not see their views.

I took my external hdd Seagate go flex to this place for them to check it out. They plugged into a computer that was in the middle of updating a window for a minute or so to hear the sound of my hdd.

Now looking back, I am thinking that was a stupid move on their part. Does anyone know if that would do any damage to my external hard drive?

Greetings !

With due respect, what you should be asking is if the place where you took the drive to have a good reputation or not, as well as trying to figure out by asking on the forum if someone knows about that particular place and if they can provide further feedback.
You can think of it a little bit like the feedback system when buying out of ebay.

As your specific question i would say that powering on the drive for testing was a very reasonable risk.

Sure, if the heads were scrapping the platter that would be a very bad thing to do, but the professional have no way of knowing without testing and listening first. Even powering a drive on a pc-3000 system would imply the same sort of reasonable risk. It's way better to take that reasonable risk assuming the professional will power off the drive if it just clicks rather to have all the drives that arrive for recovery opened on a clean room to check for head contact with the platter.

To further justify the reasonable risk there is also the fact that the client himself would had run the drive on a "damaged" state at least once, when the client figures out the drive is no longer working.

In the case of a crashed head on the platter the moment the client runs the drive with the heads scrapping the platters might determine the possibility for the data to be no longer recoverable.

Data recovery professionals have to take reasonable risks to diagnose the problems with the drives and this sounds like a reasonable risk at least to me, as long as the professional power off the drive as soon as some strange sound is detected, pointing to the need of clean room work.

I think I was not making myself clear on the question.

I meant to say that this guy from this shop plugged my HDD into a computer that he was in the middle of updating windows. In other words, he plugged my HDD into one of his computer that was in the middle of updating windows or updating something. He plugged my HDD into this computer so that he can hear the sound of my HDD. I would like to know if this guy did any damage to my HDD because he plugged my HDD into a computer that was in the middle of updating windows. I hope my question makes sense this time.

Very unlikely.

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What you should be asking to yourself is if you took the drive to a data recovery professional or to a regular computer repair shop in order to save some money.
I've read your other posts on the thread and realized that someone already told you that by the use of DDI one of the heads can't read any data.
If this statment is true, what would you honestly expect that one regular computer repair shop without specialized data recovery tools could do to improve your sittuation ? Isn't it natural to think that it would just cause more damage ?

Regarding your specific question, if windows can't see the drive and/or the computer used was free of virus and didn't change the partition table/file alocation table or didn't try to initialize your drive the possible amount of caused damage would be the same as just connecting the drive to a power source, or to put it simpler the fact that the computer used to test your drive was as well running updates it's not a significant issue and the windows updates by themselfs wouldn't further damage the drive.

Madoka,

woow.....hm....are you a specialist in data retrieval?

I did not mention on here that I took it to a computer repair shop. It is clearly evidenced from my previous posts about this subject that I am fully aware that a computer repair shop would not be able to help me retrieve data. why would you assume I took it to a computer repair shop just because I mentioned that they were updating something in their computer while servicing me. I called them and they told me that they service in data retrieval. I was very specific with my problems. I did not just call them up and said my external HDD is broken and needed their services in repairing it. I called them and told them that I cannot access data from my external HDD and need help in retrieving the data. I told them the problems and very specific. I have already gone to several places and I would not just waste time going to a place that would flat out does not perform my needed services.

For some odd reason, you sound upset that I even ask my question. Excuse my ignorant, my question may sound dumb to you but I need to know so that I can properly inform a prospective data retrieval company what was done and not done so that they can properly diagnose the problems.

Hello again;

I just want to clarify that in any way i was upset with your coments.

I did assume that the "guy updating windows" or updating something else on the system was a diferent person then the ones who claimed that DDI wouldn't image on one head as i couldn't picture someone updating windows and running DDI to clone your drive at the same time.

I'm very sorry but at this point i am unable to assist you further or provide more explanations. Maybe someone else can provide what you are searching for.
Wish that you manage to get your data at the end.

+1

It will be expensive, but if you want top notch service, seek a specialist in data recovery, a real one, reputable company. Hopefully, it is not too late at this point. Don't be surprised if any upfront non-refundable fees will be presented to you to even attempt anything as the drive has been through few things already it seems.

The simplest one sentence reference question to find out if who you are dealing with is a specialist is asking them: "what does your service specialize in?" if the answer is anything other than "data recovery/recover data", then keep searching.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Yes you give me confirmation of my research i told them on this forum that in some PCB swap working on ROM not necessary but nobody believe me.

I got successes with different model, different site code, different fw, different everything withing my experience all this things not necessary only Date code and country of manufacturing should be same.

I got this thing with my old hdd's experience i were working on 540 mb to 30 gb and no need work on ROM.

already complete freeplay donor match in WD,Seagate, Hitachi and Toshiba up to 2 TB.

I want to dedicate your invented name to this formula "Freeplay donor match"

Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm not !

I'm just a witch hunter that made a contract with an alien in exchange for a wish and ended up as a "Magical Shoujo".

I only work with hard drives on my spare time ! So no, I'm not a professional data recovery girl.

Greetings !

I'm not quite sure I did understand, but Nick_ST just stated he did a successful swap using those 2 PCBs from different drives. He didn't mentioned anything about ROM.
It's quite obvious that he transferred the ROM from the patient to the donor as those are F3 arch drives and adaptives are stored on ROM.
Regarding the Seagate drives you will only get away without swapping ROM on models older then Barracuda 7200.10 and you still have to use the same ROM code / firmware version as in the patient drive.

In one case of 3TB internal disk WU & SU donor works and on the other hand we use a TK & TK donor for freeplay and guess what patient had 08 heads and donor has 06 heads. They surprise sometimes..

thanks for the sharing.

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