Hard drive failure - Dell laptop

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nmh001

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any help would be much appreciated...

my hard drive (on a dell laptop inspiron 9100) completely stopped working about 10 days ago. Dell sent me a new hard drive as I had an extended warranty on it, but the key issue for me is recovering the data on the old one. i sent it to a data recovery place. they charged 95 euro initially and then an additional 205 euro for "a part". they then sent it over to "a sister company" in the UK who now say they can't get anything off it.

has anyone any advice? i REALLY need a lot of files off the old hard drive. mainly word and excel and some pdfs. all work-related.

is it unusual that NO files can be recovered?

i didn't drop it or anything.i am not hugely computer-literate but i really don't understand how it can just stop working when i turned it on one morning and no-one seems to have an explanation! the only bad habit i had was not shutting it down while moving it which i've since been told is not good for it (i thought once it hibernated it was as good as shut down)

moral of the story is to back up files. i'd been meaning for months to copy alot of files to the network in work...
 
I wasn't gonna name them but that's a coincidence! - that's the company i've paid 300 euro to but they've told me they can't get anything off of it.

i have no reason to doubt they're being genuine, and i don't, but i'm just amazed they've drawn a blank and am wondering have i any other options?

you hear about people who try to delete stuff from their computers but specialists can retrieve the files, and here i am losing files despite my best efforts. I'd understand if there had been a fire or i had dropped it or dumped it into water, but what happened was that it was working on a thursday evening and then suddenly not working on a friday morning.
 
It depends on what the failure is, but it's unusual to get nothing.

Get the original drive and ship it to a specialist. The risk here is that efforts to date will have caused further damage, making it harder to recover any data.

One of the leaders in this area would be CBL in the UK. They analyse the drive free, assess how much data they can retrieve, and give a quote for recovery. You will have to courier the drive over. If you are in Dublin, you can drop it into Mail Boxes Etc. on Pearse St., quote CBL's account number, and ship it for free. It will help if you can tell CBL exactly what's been done to the drive so far.

While waiting for the quote, assess how much the data is really worth to you -- how much time would it take to recreate? It sounds like a hardware failure, so I'd expect it to be expensive to recover (€1000 or more.). You might be able to find somewhere cheaper than CBL, but you get what you pay for in this area. Plus they are no foal no fee, and given someone has already attempted a recovery, I wouldn't be willing to spend more money speculatively.

the only bad habit i had was not shutting it down while moving it which i've since been told is not good for it (i thought once it hibernated it was as good as shut down)
Click to expand...

And you'd be right. Hibernate in Windows powers off the machine completely. I rarely shutdown my laptops. Assuming you do mean Hibernate and not suspend?
 
I would imagine that if a professional data recovery place cannot recover data off it then this is not possible but just in case they are somehow mistaken then have a look at this post.
 
Hard drives can develop mechanical faults (such as play or looseness in the centre bearing) which makes it extremly expensive to even attempt recovery of data.
 
i think that, like myself, you have learned the hard way always to keep backups of your data! i lost 320GB drive recently!

you could try using GetDataBack for NTFS if you can attatch it to another pc somehow, but i doubt you can do either of these things considering the drive is a 2.5" (whereas a PC size is 3.5"), and since the experts failed to find any data on it i suppose there are no alternatives (unless they were 'dishonest').
 
snowden said:
i doubt you can do either of these things considering the drive is a 2.5" (whereas a PC size is 3.5"),
Click to expand...

You can connect laptop hard drives to desktops internally using a special cable or via [broken link removed].

and since the experts failed to find any data on it i suppose there are no alternatives (unless they were 'dishonest').
Click to expand...

The OP posted this is in August, so I assume it's no longer a live issue.
 
Sorry to hear about your data loss, but it just goes to show how valuable backing up your data is.

Especially nowadays with the very low price of external HDDs.

Most laptops have HDDs of around 60g --> 80GB. OK the bigger ones have 120GB but how many of us actually fill out HDDs?

So if you check out the prices of external HDDs, you will see that they are a great investment.

I bought a Seagate 250GB external one off Amazon for £44 with free delivery after nearly losing the only copy of my honeymoon photos when my HDD developed a bad boot sector. Thankfully my little bro was able to recover all the data off it.
 
RMCF said:
...
Most laptops have HDDs of around 60g --> 80GB. OK the bigger ones have 120GB but how many of us actually fill out HDDs?...
Click to expand...

I do. I've a 160GB drive in mine. My music folder is about 140GB on its own. So the 160GB doesn't come close to holding all my data. I have a 250GB 2.5" external I carray around with the laptop. Some laptops can take 2 drives, thus 2x250 would be a laptop with 500GB internall.
 
RMCF said:
...
Most laptops have HDDs of around 60g --> 80GB. OK the bigger ones have 120GB but how many of us actually fill out HDDs?...
Click to expand...

I do. I've a 160GB drive in mine. My music folder is about 140GB on its own. I have a 250GB 2.5" external I carray around with the laptop. Some laptops can take 2 drives, thus 2x250 would be a laptop with 500GB internally.
 
But you are a rarity.

I am currently on the hunt for a new laptop and many of the news ones still only have HDDs in the range 60gb->120gb.

I would say very few people out there have HDDs of 120GB or higher.

140GB of music !!
 
Not everyone listens to lowbitrate crud. :)

External HD's of large capacity 250GB+ are flying off the shelves. If you have digital camera, a 80/160GB iPod, A few movies, a few games at 1GB each, bit of work stuff, some college projects. It all adds up. Especially if you do a regular backup.

Its mainly home users who use a lot of disk space. At work we all have about 160GB+ and hardly use 25% of the space. But thats because of the type of work I'm doing. In the past I worked in multimedia and consumed vast amounts of disk space.

For example if you look at the Dell 17" laptops they can be configure with 2 Hard drives.

http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/products/features.aspx/inspn_1720?c=ie&cs=iedhs1&l=en&s=dhs
 
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