My wife's hard drive crashed in her laptop and need someone to get the pictures off of it. It doesn't smell burn, but it wont boot up. It's a laptop SATA drive. Can I get a recommendation for someone in the area or someone on the board and a rough price for 200g of pictures? PM me if you'de like the job and other can attest to your reputability.

[Edited on May 2, 2011 at 10:40 AM. Reason : ..]

5/2/2011 10:39:24 AM

if it's totally fried you'll want to send this to a lab. And you're going to shell out $Texas for anyone reputable.

http://www.securedatarecovery.com/

Those guys are reputable. You'll also be interested in these guys:
http://www.backblaze.com/

5/2/2011 11:01:28 AM

When you say "won't boot up" do you mean the OS starts to load then fails, the drive is not detected by the bios (no boot device or similar error), or the drive won't actually spin up? Depending on the nature of the failure, this may be a job that just about anyone in here can do.

5/2/2011 2:17:25 PM

yeah, if it's just that you can't get into windows, but the drive is spinning up without beeps or the click of death, it's probably easy to pull data off it

even if it IS clicking, the freezer trick might work long enough to get data off

5/2/2011 3:40:43 PM

It's not spinning I guess, it's making no noise at all. When I booted up the laptop this morning it said no hard drive found. I put it in my laptop (has dual bays) and windows didn't recognize it as being there. I normally wouldn't care but this has all my wifes pictures on it, and she never listened to me about backing it up.

5/2/2011 4:07:58 PM

Just buy a hard drive dock like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153066&cm_re=hard_drive_dock-_-17-153-066-_-Product and do it yourself. If the drive spins up, its probably readable.

That dock will make your drive act like a USB drive.

5/2/2011 4:16:34 PM

That wouldn't do anything different than trying it in two different computers would it?

5/2/2011 4:18:32 PM

Your wife needs to listen to you. 200Gb of recovery from a dead drive is going to cost thousands of dollars.

5/2/2011 4:20:42 PM

Okay, I guess I lied. I reinstalled it in the dual bay laptop, and the drive IS spinning, but windows isn't recognizing that it is there? Where do I go from here?

5/2/2011 4:28:44 PM

Right click "my computer" go to "manage". Go to "disk management" and see if the device shows up there as unformatted or unrecognized. If it's powering up and spinning, there's a chance it could just have a corrupted partition table and isn't readable by the OS.

5/2/2011 7:41:37 PM

Are there other drives hooked up also? Could be that it's tying to use a drive letter already in use. You van change the driver letter in that same disc management screen.

5/2/2011 8:14:56 PM

Nope, bios nor disk management is recognizing it, but it is spinning... AHHHHHHHHh.... and I can put the original hard drive back in the dual bay and it recognizes it.

[Edited on May 2, 2011 at 8:27 PM. Reason : mmm]

5/2/2011 8:25:54 PM

Sounds like the controller may just be bad then, which is surprisingly enough a good thing (simple to fix anyway). You just get another identical drive, swap the logic board, and hope it's all good on the inside.

[Edited on May 2, 2011 at 8:30 PM. Reason : board]

5/2/2011 8:29:27 PM