[ale] need recommendations for a good local company to recover data off of a dead laptop hard drive

[Greg Freemyer]

First ballpark numbers are $800 if they just have to swap out the
electronics and pull the data off.  If they have to use a clean room
to get to the heads/platters you're looking at $1500 - $2500 in my
experience.

The only 2 local options I know with clean rooms are Cherry Systems in
Marietta and a one man shop I know (IIRC Scott Moulton).  He claims to
have a full clean room and do hundreds of recoveries a year, but I
have never seen his operation or sent any business his way so I won't
recommend him.

Cherry exclusively does recoveries and is (was) a 5 or 10 man
operation.  They charge an evaluation fee of a several hundred dollars
last I worked with them (3 yrs ago).  We quit using them because of
the eval fee, maybe they have changed the way they do business.

We exclusively work with ActionFront out of Chicago now.  (They closed
their Norcross office a year or 2 ago but they work well via FedEx.)
They have a minimal eval fee and are owned by Seagate (They were
bought just before they consolidated to Chicago.).  Also they do
hundreds of drives a week as I recall so they have plenty of
experience.

If you decide to go with ActionFront give them our name (The Norcross
Group) and they may pay us a small lead generation fee.

Thanks
Greg


On 2/22/07, Jeff Lightner <jlightner at water.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
> I don't know of a local company ? I used Pivar successfully years ago to
> recover a dead Xenix drive for me.   They talk about conversions on their
> web site but as I recall they have a clean room where they can actually
> disassemble a hard drive to get data off of it.
>
>
>
> http://www.pivar.com/convert/capabili/index.htm
>
>
>
>
>
>  ________________________________
>
>
> From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Van
> Loggins
>  Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2007 7:42 AM
>  To: Robert Reese
>  Cc: ale at ale.org
>  Subject: Re: [ale] need recommendations for a good local company to
> recoverdata off of a dead laptop hard drive
>
>
>
>
>
>
>  Hey Robert,
>
>  Unfortunately I don't have an identical model drive to switch the
> controller board out for.
>
>  I did try the drive in a 2.5" laptop drive to USB enclosure that I have and
> was unable to get it to initalize, basically the drive is not spinning, so
> it may be controller board failure or the drive motor am not sure, I'm
> afraid to mess with it too much, I want to make sure that the data can be
> recovered.
>
>  I am hoping that a data recovery company can get the info off the drive.
> The guy who owns the laptop has several progams on there with important data
> that if he can't get them back it will cost him more to have the company
> replace them than it would cost for him to get the drive recovered and then
> have the company help him get the moved programs back up and running again
> on his new drive. I don't know the specifics for the programs, just that
> they have something to do with his company which does construction work, I
> think it's some sort of architectural estimation software or something
> similar.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On 2/21/07, Robert Reese <ale at sixit.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Van,
>
>  *********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********
>  On 2/21/2007 at 6:48 PM Van Loggins wrote:
>
>  >I have a client who spilled milk on their Dell latitude D610, laptop
>  >survived but the hard drive died, it appears that the drives controller
>  >board got wet and caused the drive to die.
>  >
>  >I know that the laptop is ok, have already replaced the drive with one
>  >from fry's electronics, but they have data that they need from the
>  >original drive for their company.
>  >
>  >Can anyone recommend a good local company for data recovery?
>
>
>  I haven't tried swapping the controller board on laptop harddrive, but
> frequently it's easy on a 3.5" drive.  You might want to try swapping the
> board with an identical laptop harddrive before investing serious money in a
> data recovery effort; a Dell replacement drive would certainly cost less.
> Also, have you tried plugging the dead drive into another laptop or ide
> controller?
>
>  Cheers,
>  Robert Reese~
>
>  ------------------------------------------------------
>     * Microsoft is NOT a standard. *
>  ------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>


-- 
Greg Freemyer
The Norcross Group
Forensics for the 21st Century