How to recover data from Hard disk? (SW & HW)

[Sarath]

I have a 40GB and a 80GB HDD which are quite old. I have (had) a lot of important on them but they died of what I believe was due to a electrical surge or something, but not physical damage. The first time, it was out of warranty and the second time it fried my entire Desktop, but I did not apply for a replacement.

I want to know if there are any Services which are involved in Data recovery.
I know they are expensive but don't know how expensive they are. I would like to see if I can extract at least some of the data without breaking the bank.

I don't think any Software will help me much through the process, nor do I have the time to do that. If you guys know a place where they offer such services then please let me know, online or in Bangalore. Also let me know if you have ever got it done, the costs involved etc.

Digging up search has some oldies:

http://www.thinkdigit.com/forum/qna-...isk-print.html
Data recovery from hard disk and warranty ?
Urgent!!! Need to recover data from Hard disk

But they don't throw much light on the issue.

[dfcols71]

try lynx india that what they do nowadays

[Vyom]

Once I had my HDD crashed. Gone to Nehru Place to get data recovered. They told me it would take INR 1400. I asked them what if I had to recover just 1 gig of data? They told "doesn't matter, charges are same. Since efforts would be same".
Since I was in college at that time, and barely used to have any money I never attempted recovery and thereby lost entire one year of data.

Considering this incident happened almost 3 years ago I think it should cost around 2k. (Just my assumption).

But, I think you can try to recover data by attaching the disk as slave with a primary disk and using recovery softwares like, Stellar Phoenix NTFS Data Recovery, assuming your partitions were in NTFS.

But do it at your own risk.

[westom]

But they don't throw much light on the issue.

Long before assuming, first establish a line between hardware and software (your data). Then first learn which side of that line has the failure.

Every (responsible) disk drive manufacturer provides comprehensive hardware diagnostics for free on their web site. Better computer vendors also provide comprehensive diagnostics on the hard drive, on a provided CD, and on their web site. Or download a CD from bootdisk.com. Many easy ways to do this. Then you know the hardware is bad (and then recommendations can be made). Or software (data) is corrupted (and then the solution becomes more expensive).

First establish what you have. Then a long list of options is significantly shortened to what is appropriate for your anomaly.