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A failed disk (pay for a professional service or SpinRite?)

A failed disk (pay for a professional service or SpinRite?)

In my previous post (you don't need to read it, but it is Error “a disk read error occurred” on Windows XP), I said that my hard disk was not booting and is showing "a disk read error occurred". I took it to a recovery professional. A representative responded today told me that the NTFS partitions have an "NTFS partition system crash". I have no idea what that means. The engineer handling my drive will not be available for contact till tomorrow.

Asked by: Guest | Views: 227
Total answers/comments: 3
Guest [Entry]

"A professional data recovery procedure involves opening the drive in a ""clean room"", mounting the platters in a special machine that can read data that the drive head itself cannot. That way they can copy the drive before attempting any recovery and without risking that a flaw in the drive causes further damage.

Last I heard a quote for such an operation the price was over 10x as much as what your local company demands. (16000 Taiwan dollars seems to be about 350 euros?)

So what could that mean?

1) They will use a software tool of some kind to fix your partition. In this case, the price is understandable, but maybe you can find such a tool (or combination of tools) yourself for less than 16k? Don't know if spinrite can do it but perhaps others.

2) If they can copy the raw data without using special equipment, so can you. Even if the parition can't be mounted, you can use tools that copy the drive contents bit-by-bit, for example using ""dd"" from linux. That way you least have a copy of all the bits. Figuring out what files they are part of is another task.

3) Taiwan seems to be the promised land of tech, so perhaps they have ways to do professional clean room data recovery without charging arms and legs for it. ;)"
Guest [Entry]

I've had good luck with Spinrite recovering data for me in the past. However, my concern would be that just attempting to use Spinrite might decrease the probability of a professional shop being able to recover your data. So, you'd be great if Spinrite works, but if it fails, you might be worse off. If your data is truly that irreplaceable, you're probably going to have to spend the big $ and go straight to the shop to get the highest probability of recovery. :-(
Guest [Entry]

"I'd try SpinRite before an outside service. Remember their satisfaction guarantee, which is a 30 day no questions asked money back guarantee.

If that doesn't work, it's either serious hardware damage or software corruption... So make your choice of services then."