Retrieval of Images

Yeah I know, I should have had external hard drives but I didn't. My 12 month old Gateway hard drive failed just before Christmas and the Geek Squad finally replaced it. Unfortunately they say "since it is a mechanical failure" they cannot retrieve the data and images. Does anyone know if that is the case, and if not, who, what and where I can have them downloaded to the new hard drive. Anything I worked on since September is lost. I do have original raw images though.

Help!

I looked into this a few years ago Patricia, and found a service that would attempt (no guarantees) to take the plates out and put them in another drives mechanics. Since you have to open up a drive in a clean-room (dust can ruin it when it tries to spin up and read again) it's very expensive - I think I was told that $500 was the minimum. Some places I've seen more recently are more like $150-$200 minimum, but I'm not certain.

It's worth looking for something cheaper, but I couldn't find anything when I tried. There are some sites with tricks to try out there, like freezing the drive, and I guess anything is worth a shot. Hopefully someone else knows of a place that might do it cheaper.

I wound up losing all my data, but wasn't into photography, so my main loss was school assignments. I've been doing back-ups ever since.

If you google "broken hard drive" you can find places that do recovery,

I used DriverSavers to help a friend recover critical data from a badly damaged Mac Pro hard drive. Not cheap, but quick, reliable and professional.

I think Jim probably meant Drive Savers. "DriverSavers" seems to be just an ad/placeholder site.

I know it's just anecdotal, but putting the drive in a freezer (sealed first in plastic bag) actually worked for a drive that failed here at work. It spun up and we quickly transferred the data files and replaced the drive. Whew. That made me a back-up believer.

Pete D.