can someone recommend a data recovery specialist?
 

one near los angeles would be best, but anywhere my friend can send in the hard drive would be great.

what are the usual prices to try and recover an important file on a harddrive thats been partially erased/destroyed?

way more than its worth unless its the great american novel


edit: i used these guys a few years ago:
http://www.data-master.com/

not sure what they are worth now

yeah? its a important database of real estate mailing adresses. semi-valuable, but not priceless.

i think those guys are in cali

Its very pricy

like what's pricey? like i believe shed be willling to spend a couple hundred. but not like $500+ or anything like that.

They won't even take the fucking screws out of the drive for 500 bucks. :) Try adding another 0 to the end of 500 with no guarantee of anything being recovered.

i paid 3500 to get some dbs off a a drive about 4 years ago

ok thanks! thats the kind of info i wanted to hear.

damn. thats sounds like a good business to get into actually. you can always make a fortunte off of desperate people.

A friend of mine had a similar thing done here in Europe for $5000. He had years of programming code on the PC and no full back-up so he paid.

that sucks.

im personally obssesive about backups for valuable information. all my really valuable stuff is saved on at least seven different servers across the world. lol

You may want to try this AMAZING NEW TECHNOLOGY called The Yellow Pages:helpme

There's a company in Northern California, forgot there name.
I believe in the North Bay. North of the City.

IF there is no acutual damage to the hard drive just erased files i could probably get it off the drive for you.

Fitst thing you want to do tho is unplug the drive so new files dont overwrite what was erased.

Hit me up on icq 14420613

You might try this first http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm
The trial will let you see if it can find the file to recover before you would need to purchase it.

Good reason to make backups. Cost like $500+ to recover a drive.

Try this www.hddrecovery.com.au/downloads/200ways.pdf

Try FBI.gov

They can recover it, but you have to give them a good reason. :)

BinaryBiz's VirtualLab is absolutely fantastic!!!

I tried 2 cheaper programs (stellarinfo and another one) but they didn't work on the damage HD I had ...

VirtualLab ROCKS!!!!! (the business model is great too but that is another subject matter)

http://www.binarybiz.com

edit-didn't fully read thread

if the file has been deleted or the drive has been formatted, you can recover it with software, although if another file has been written over it, its lost. I used to use some software called recover98, it was fairly slow but it worked really well

It depends on several things. First, what filesystem type is/was it? There are plenty of tools out there that will attempt to get the files back. However if the blocks have been overwritten, partially or fully, you're looking at a lot more cash. There is a place in SD that does data recovery, they're supposed to be VERY good, and $5000-$10000 is around the price point that I recall.

Does the disk spin up? If you can get power to it and it spins, have them dupe the drive with a disk duper(you can usually get this done at a decent chop shop, I know a place in OC that can do, assuming we gave them back their duper...:))

Google is your friend....

Did you try John Edward?

http://www.scifi.com/johnedward/down...ages/john1.jpg

Dr. Norton is very good!