A hard drive recovery service provider is a company that specializes in taking failed or broken hard-drives and recovering the data. Hard drive recovery services are often very expensive, and unfortunately cannot guarantee the recovery of your data. Because using a hard drive recovery service can be a bit of a gamble, let’s go over some options you should consider before using such a service:
The most important thing, of course, is to determine why your hard drive isn’t working. While the hard drive itself may have failed or may be damaged (in which case you would likely need a recovery service) sometimes something within the operating system or within the computer itself (although rare) is causing the problem. And while it is unlikely that a power connector or a drive cable will fail, it’s worth it to test for these rare failures only because the price of hard drive failure recovery isn’t cheap.
Before you take a drive to a hard drive recovery service, it’s a good idea to try the hard drive in a different machine (as a slave drive if possible — any good tech knows what that means) or to try to access the drive outside the computer. By outside the computer I’m referring to external devices that allow you to “plug-in” an internal drive and use it easily with another computer. I personally had a drive that failed and was not recognized by it’s “home” computer, but when attached to a different machine, I was able to recover the data.
The bottom line with recovery services is that there is usually no guarantee, and the company will charge a fee regardless of whether or not the can recover your data. The reason is that the hard drive recovery company has no way to know how badly damaged the drive is (did you drop it from your desk or from a building) but they still need to do a lot of work on the drive to find out.