Hello, have a friend who has just had the computer hard drive replaced as the old one died on the weekend the company who replaced the hard drive suggests she send the old one off to a company (do not know the name) and it will cost about $800 for them to get photos and personal records from it. Is this a reasonable price? She is in Sydney - Homebush area, but home is in the Blue Mountains. Any information or suggestions would be great, thanks
Need to find best price to get photos and tax information of hard drive that crashed
![](https://files.ozbargain.com.au/g/38.jpg)
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$800 is fairly cheap if the unit needs to opened up (in a cleanroom)
btw. could you find out the name of the company?
yes, she will use backups in the future thanks, I will ask her if she got a quote from the company or just the guys who replaced the hard drive advised this. thanks
Hi
I have used these people before…great service and reasonable price cost me $100 a couple of years ago. About to send another old drive off to them in the next couple of weeks.
http://www.datarecoveryexpress.com.au
Cheers
depending on the type of death of the hard drive, have you ruled out DIY software based solutions such as getdataback ?
One way to get a fried drive going again is to find another identical drive and swap the circuit boards (providing it's the circuit board which is the problem).
You could try this if you want, but apart from requiring some ability and the difficulty in sorcing matching controllers, there are further issues that the controller stores information about damaged and reallocated sectors, so you will probably lose some data anyway.
There is a guy on overclockers.com.au who does data recover.
If the drive still starts up, my first choice would always be Spinrite…US$89.
http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm
Worth having, if only to prevent future failures.
Many testimonials about recovering "dead" drives on the website.
Mount the drive in a PC, boot from disk or USB, may require you to set the drive to IDE mode in bios if currently set to AHCI or RAID. Works great! Use it every few months to keep disk fresh.
Depends on the nature of the failure, but any place will charge huge amounts. Furthermore they generally change this regardless of what (if anything) they can actually recover. There will often be a variety of additional fees, so pay close attention to all of this before sending it anywhere.
Too late for this, but backups are 1000 times cheaper than recovery.