I live in a remote rural area and currently service PC hardware primarily. I have a growing number of light data recovery incidents. I am looking to expand my services to handle many of these lighter duty recovery projects, but I am still very small and limited what I can afford to invest into this expansion. I am not looking into performing the elaborate expensive processes like platter and head changes. I have already managed to do quite a bit of data recovery by using some free software and some environmental changes (gently heating and cooling the drives). I'm looking at software and hardware methods to expand my abilities to recover data from drives that exhibit some of the lighter failures like; drives that aren't recognized in the bios but spin up ok, or say have some mild clicking issues, or one that the electronics board has been replaced with an exact match but doesn't show in the BIOS, or lost partition information of a as many file systems as possible. I do understand there are a lot of possible causes for the given examples. I'd like to find out from someone with experience in this field what would be in their opinion what device/software combo would cover the most ground for the least amount of investment. Any help is greatly appreciated in advance.
Thank you

If you don't want to spend $20000 US, forget it, unless you want to do logical recovery only and contract elsewhere for physical work. Just remember that to do logical work, you need to learn how to tell when a drive is damaged, and therefore when to give up.

Computermark do you know where I can get a cheap heart bypass machine? I thinking of performing the operation myself but cant afford real equipment....

_________________
Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

Outsource is the key. Or you'll face more problems and losses than revenue.

Took the words right out of my mouth....

This is really the truth. You can basically only do easy logical recoveries. Even so, I don't see how even this can be done without doing it right. You would at least need some Grade-A imaging equipment at the bare minimum.

I don't even see how logical recoveries with many BADs can be done without some type of hardware control (you can build something yourself of course), but you STILL have to invest a considerable amount IMHO to do a good job.

The minimum requirements even just for a small shop to get started with just one imager (either SD, ACE/deepspar/Forensic/Ninja/WHATEVERyouWantHERE/???) would be thousands $5k to $10k. Which I consider to be the "least amount of investment".

PS: There is a degree of insult to anyone when asked how to do a professional task with minimal effort. The two don't coexist well with each other.

_________________
http://pcrecoveryllc.com

Let them try... The worst things that can happen are bankruptcy, being beaten from angry customers, 'pc3000 hardly used for sale' ... Or a success story. Who knows?

There appears to be a misconception about my intentions so I will try to define where I'm coming from a little better. I am a one man show in a very rural retirement community. I offer my services mostly to people of lesser means and I charge very little to enable these people that are living on a fixed income to get affordable help. This is not about saving some large corporation from a major catastrophe or even small companies for that matter. If I provide services for the few small businesses around here, I make sure they have good enough backup in place to almost never reach such a point. This is more about getting started and as I said before I’m keeping to lighter failures (mostly logical but may replace a spindle motor chip or match up a complete control board) for now. This is about getting grandma her pictures, print master projects emails, etc back. They cannot afford the prices of the outsourcing alternatives I’ve looked into. I, being of the community service sort of mindset, am willing to invest what money and time I can into some tools to get started. I would like to get as many of these old folks their data back as I possibly can without raising my rates. My lifestyle is based on generosity and I give all I can as I am also very accepting and appreciative of others generosity. I must start somewhere and would like to get some tips on some specific products that are best suited to get me going. I was hoping I could reach someone that has enough experience with some of these products (both software and hardware) to point me in the proper direction so I may offer the best service without having to reinvent the wheel and test each product. I hope there is another generous person out there that is willing to help me out. I really doubt I threaten to take anybody’s business away by getting grandma’s pictures back because grandma is usually going to kiss them goodbye. But I will keep the drives and I eventually will figure out how to get the data back for these people.

So get yourself some electronics tools and familiarize yourself with surface mount component removal/replacement, hot air station would be useful. Buy GetGataBack, possibly Rstudio, get yourself a linux based machine to image things on with dd, ddrescue. Just remember that you need to learn to diagnose the problem first. Figure out "Is this drive going to die if I image it?" An image that looks like it's about to take weeks to pull is a REALLY bad sign.

I like Media Tools Pro, you can get great results with it by imaging onto a blank drive (make sure the drive is 100% zero first). It at times requires constant attention and fine tuning, otherwise it will quite happily take two weeks to image your drive if it hits trouble, possibly ruining it in the process. You have to learn how (and remember) to adjust read timeout, number of retries allowed, and amount of artificial delay to add. I like small numbers of retries with an increase in delay in most cases of somewhat bad though still readable sectors, as it causes the drive to retry less. Under supervision, you can do great things with it.

Just remember, don't be the one trick horse. You need a collection of tools and a collection of information. Just learn on your own stuff rather than customer stuff. Either that or take a bad drive that has already been recovered and play with it until you get the hang of how to do it most quickly and effectively.

You're still going to need a few tools, look to at about $2000-2500. Media Tools costs money. dd, ddrescue do not. Don't use media tools to repair damage to partition tables or partitions, even on an imaged drive, where anything but FAT16 or FAT32 is concerned (no HPFS, ext2, NTFS, etc). You will be wasting your time, it will just zork the partition and make the headache worse.

I am skeptical about your business plan. You're going to do charity and become slave of your 'market' with little revenue, and lot of time spent/frustration. Don't forget dr is more physical nowaday.