Nationwide Data Recovery - too good to be true?

[EyeCandy]

Wanted to see if anyone had anything good or bad to say about this place before I send my critical data to this place:www.nationwidedatarecovery.com (http://www.nationwidedatarecovery.com/)Seems, they are extremely affordable. My 2TB media server crashed..and 500 is worth it....

[zot]

An unreadable drive does not necessarily mean it needs expensive 'clean room' data recovery.

There have been some defective firmwares that caused drive "crashes" - a factory defect that reached epidemic levels a year or two ago.

If the circuit board goes bad, a replacement can be cheap.

Then there's also the dry-ice method that can keep a drive limping along enough to copy files.

[EyeCandy]

Is this the method, I've heard of putting it in the freezer over night? Almost skeptical of this...Is it possible to do more damage cause of this? What about condensation?

I took it to a local computer vendor and it said he wasn't able to fix via software methods...

[zot]

These "software methods" you mention I assume would be simply running a data-recovery application that basically just "un-deletes" the unreadable files on the drive.

Hard drives can also have firmware failures, as well as hardware failures.

Regarding condensation ... I don't know exactly what sort of damage this would do, but I would hope that most people not living in the Atacama Desert would be wise enough to put the to-be-frozen drive in a sealed plastic bag with only the wires sticking out.

[EyeCandy]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfBPbzsd4c4


Well...I made a video, to show what the hard drive is doing now...after putting it in the freezer....Looking for any help is appreciated

[Artemis]

When a drive first starts to have seek errors putting it into a freezer overnight 'can' (no guarantees here) resolve the seek errors long enough to retrieve the data from the drive. The drive will ultimately fail so this is is a hail mary move, in other words you have nothing more to lose when you try this method it may work it may not, in your case from the video you can hear the drive spin up, but it doesn't seek it just errors so it's future uses are largely ornamental.

[Artemis]

I should explain further, from your video the drive spindle is winding up, albeit slowly but the read/write heads are not moving out to read the platters, you are just getting an error code from the firmware. Replacing the controller on the drive with another one from an identical drive may resolve the issue. Personally I believe the drive is dead and the only way to retrieve the data is to send it to a proper data recovery center with clean room engineers. There may be cheap deals out there but the company that has been at the forefront of this technology is Ontrack Data Recovery.