guy777

Recently had a HD crash I was unable to fix, see original post here
came across easyrecovery.co.uk charging a temptingly low 'limited offer' flat fee of £250+tax (£287.50) to fix any HD problem
After being advised by the tech hardware team I contacted them to find out if they use clean rooms or not
here's how it went....

me: Hi, I have a failing Maxtor USB HDD & was wondering if you have in house clean rooms & if so what certification level they are?
ER: Yes we can recover from this type of hard drive failure.
Please contact us on 0800 075 0720 for a quote. Best Regards, John
me: thanks John, i'll take that as a no then ;)
ER: Thats a pick up the phone and get a quote from us:)
We don't give out answers to random questions via email. John

of course knowing full well they'd see me coming with a pertinent question I had deliberately taken the precaution of firing up the ol' decoy random question generator...
my underhand devisive trickery had been foiled..
damn they're good

also came across this interesting post about them written by the director of abcdatarecovery.co.uk saying they damage the drives & only do overpriced software recovery
could be its just biased mis-info but his website seems a lot more upfront about how they operate
he seems to be right about the permanent sale price though
checked the ER homepage out on archive.org, been having that sale for about 5 years now!

raptor_pa

There ya go, there are lots of good recovery houses, the absolute cheapest I know starts at $800.00 up to 400 GB after that it is 800 plus parts. That being said it is one of our competitors, sort of - more like another company we have good working relationship with LOL. Our prices aren't that cheap ( actually I'm not really sure how he is doing it for those prices LOL ).

viloscohaagen

hi guy777 and raptor_pa

i too am in almost the same situation as you guy.

my laptop suddenly slowed down dramatically after an incident involving a samsung mp3 player recharging in my laptops usb and also playing some other mp3s on winamp causing a blue screen crash which id neve seen before. so i restarted and quickly backed up all my stuff ( 10 years worth of all kinds of files like family photos, documents, my own music ive made etc etc and videos of sports events im in) on to a Maxtor Basics 500gb HDD.

so now everything is on there so therefore its no longer a back up its the only source of originals!!!

so then i reformatted my laptop using the software already on the laptop.

so now i have a brand new laptop again, so i start doing all the windows updates to get it back to sp whatever i had a week ago.

BUT this is where i messed up (i think)

i was transferring stuff from the maxtor back onto the fresh laptop in between windows update installations.

BUT on one occasion i forgot to unplug the maxtor and it was still running. i started a windows update for some microsoft.net 3.5 thing SP1 hotfix and something strange happened.

while i was browsing the maxtor i noticed that in F:\ where all my folders were i noticed some new alphanumerical folders suddenly there. i immediately realised that the windows update installation was installing some of what should be going to the C: onto the Maxtor F:\

so once the installtion was finished and i later found out had failed when i checked the update reivew history, i tried to delete the 4 or 5 windows update folders off the Maxtor F: but i remember it wouldnt let me. they were protected or something liek that. but eventually and i cant rememebr now how i got rid of them ( maybe just cutting and pasting onto my desktop or renaming cant remmber exactly).

and i think since then i started getting these pop ups every now and again saying something like " the disk isnt formatted, would you like to format now YES or Cancel"
i always chose cancel.
anywya everything seems to still be working ok so i think nothing more of it. i spend the rest of the day just going on the net and listengin to songs off the maxtor via winamp.

next day i start transferring stuff onto my laptop from the maxtor after approx 5 or 6 hours of the maxtor being on constantly. i installed dreamweaver directly off the maxtor wihch had the setup files on it ( which i have never done that way before, normally copy it to the desktop and run setup.exe from there). not long after that i started listening to winamp to entertain me while i was transferring yet more files onto the dekstop from the maxtor and then suddenly the dreaded happened. winamp suddenly stopped playing and the window showing F:\ folders closed.

that was the last time it was functioning normally... so i tried reconnecting the maxtor and it loaded up ok but somewhat slowly and noisily. i saw the yellow pop bubble for the first time saying "delayed write failure " and the F:M$ft error saying cannot save the file etc etc....

my heart sank and i havent been the same since.

10 years of stuff is on there! my whole life basically. its so depressing. i live near london so am going to take this to try and be recovered by Seagate. they say they are ISO certified so they are the only hope really. theres lots of other cheap ones but are they worth the risk if theyre not up to the same standard as the seagate company who make maxtors drives? i dont want to risk it! im going to visit them tomorrow at their regent street branch in central london. i will let u know what happens incase u might want to take urs there too. good luck

viloscohaagen

oh ye i forgot to say what happened when i reconnected the maxtor and tried to view the folders again.

i could see all teh folders in the F:\

but i when i try to open any of those folders i get an error message saying not acesibble or something like that i cant remember exactly what as i havent turned the maxtor back on since so as not to damage it anymore than it already is if it is physically damaged internally.
but basically i cant go into any subfolders

also i scanned it with the seagate tool and it failed the short and long test if thats of any interest ot anyone.

i didnt run scan disk to repair it as i thought it might erase data in the process and neither did i defrag. i did run avg scan for about 30 seconds but it was so slow only scanned 3 files so i stopped thinking it was probably damaging it.

thats all ive done really and not turned the maxtor on since yesterday. will go to london seagate branch tomorrow to see if they can recover the data on the maxtor fingers crossed!!!

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&so...5051119&dtab=0

raptor_pa

What ISO sert do they have, probably has nothng to do with data recovery or they have a ISO cerified clean room - not a particluar biggie. I'm sure they will be able to recover the drive. From the sound sof you r problem so could a LOT of other data recovery houses. Seagate got into the data recovery business by buying a DR company a few years ago.
It actually sounds like your problems could be recoverable at home with software, the only thing I see as concerning is failing the seatools tests.
You have treated teh drive correctly however. Chkdsk or scandisk are designed to handle simple logical errors in the file structure, not to recover from data lass. Defragging does NOTHING to fix problems, merely moves stuff around on the disk, and with file system corruption would easily cause loss of data by overwriting recoverable data with what it could find.
Again Seagate recovery should have great success, they won't be the cheapest guys in town and there are lots of other DR shops that could easily handle your issues also.
Looking forward to hearing the outcome!!

viloscohaagen

oh ye another thing i forgot to mention was that it has fallen off a table desk 3 times onto a tiled floor but has been fine everytime i checked it. the last time it fell (because i got up and as i walked away my leg pulled the cables attached to the maxtor and pulled it off the desk from a height of about 1m high)

to clarify the whole situation - do u think the error could be because of that alone or a combination even of the following

1. the windows update installing folders onto the maxtor F:\ and me then trying to remove them when i should have just left them on there.

2. keeping the maxtor drive on for over 5 hours non stop ( a day after incident 1. occurred)

3. double clicking on the setup.exe for dreamweaver cs4 which was on the maxtor instead of putting the setup folder on my desktop and doubleclicking on it from there.( this was the last major thing i did on the maxtor before it finally messed up completely)

4. dropping the maxtor drive from the desktop of 1m height onto a tiled floor 3 times. the first drop was in the first week of january 2009, the second drop was about a two weeks ago and the third drop was 24hours after the second drop. ( just stating all this so that you can see how relevant the droppings might be to the 30th crashing of the maxtor)

raptor_pa

Well the drops could have a definite effect, Maxtors and seagates are very susceptible to the spindle getting out of alignment on impacts.... Doubt it had anything to do with the folder deletion. Shouldn't have cared if DW setup wasn't on the c drive, I would say the three drops finally caught up with you...

viloscohaagen

oh dear....so what does that mean?

bad news? very bad news?.....is it still as repairable as u thought earlier or are things looking much bleaker now?...if its physicaly/mechanical damage is that worse i.e less chance of recovering anything ?(even though i can still connect ok and can even see the contents of the F:\ but cant go into the folders)

just like to get some idea what the chances are now of the recovery being a success in % now that u think the drops have probably caused the errors.

its just so many variables/ abnormal events occurred in a short space of time that i cant tell which is the main cause. u say its most likely the spindle getting out of alignment so do u think maybe the many hours of non stop use of the maxtor might have overworked the maxtor which couldnt handle it because of the drops weeks before?

from your experience whats the chances of a company like seagate recovering all data if their diagnosis is the same as yours (spindle alignment prob)?

thanks for all your help so far raptor i really appreciate all and any info, ive been losing days of sleep its nearly 4am now actually here in uk haha. i know im reapeating my words a lot im just slightly brain dead from all the stress this is causing my already stressed out brain. time for another shot of vodka i think :(

raptor_pa

If you can see the folders, then that is a plus, normally if the spindle was whacky you wouldn't see anything. Again you have done the right thing by not running the drive at this point. If the drive can mount then chances are very good. the normal fix for the spindle issue is to swap the platters into a donor drive, replace the PCB or at least reload the nvRam. On these drives it is a bit tricky, probably not for Seagate's techs since I'm sure they have the tools in house to handle their new platter configurations, Those of us in the rest of the DR world hav had to develop our own methods and tools for handling their spacers - the commercially available tools are to be released in a couple of months. All in all from what you have described it should be a relatively smooth recovery. If the drive running when it was dropped, then it may not be a 100% recovery, although a good chance for that - but it sounds like the potential to be a very good recovery. Remember tho, another drive for backup is a lot cheaper than recovery :)

guy777

well looks like you'll have to wait a bit longer getting up to regent street what with london being under a foot of snow

interested to hear how much they charge

i wasnt too impressed with seagate's online customer services
i opened an online case with them on 18th Jan and got my 1st reply on 31st!

they recommended running windows scandisk then seagate tools and failing that to contact the DR dept
i gave them the error code from maxtors tools all they told me was:
"it actually refers to a fail within the external hard drive and it needs to be replaced"
was hoping for something a little more specific than that

finally and perhaps most worryingly they recommended without any provisos I try to re-format the drive.. not too clever

raptor_pa

Well they work under a couple of assumptions...
1) Our responsibility is to keep the hardware running.
2) The user's responsibility is to maintain backups - and they assume everyone does.
3) When you contact tech support, their job is not data recovery, it is to get your hardware back to useable condition. So yeah, from their point of view, the data doesn't matter and a format would be the fix they would and should recommend - however if you don't have a backup then we need to look at the recovery first. While that seems like a rather silly way to go about it, for those of us in the recovery business, it's a great way to do it :)

guy777

sure makes sense, i was just thinking that if i had some kind of mechanical fail then the last thing id wanna be doing was even turning the thing on let alone formatting it.

i guess you're saying i should infer from their advice that it's not a mechanical fault then?

i wish they'd just said that
telling me the error code.. "refers to a fail within the external hard drive and it needs to be replaced" isn't saying anything i dont already know

raptor_pa

LOL, kind of obvious huh?? That's probably what his trouble shooting procedure book said when he looked up that error. It still could be a mechanical error. Again their concern isn't for your data, so spinning the drive isn't a concern for them, and trying to format isn't too far out of the realm of let's try this and see what happens troubleshooting. Just because their tech suggested a format, doesn't mean it's not physical... you are looking at it logically!! LOL

guy777

ahh that must be where im going wrong