Hello,

My wife has an Asus computer that went dark yesterday. Took it to Best Buy's Geek Squad, who told her that the 500 gb hardrive was fried. Her term. They are replacing the hard drive, but meanwhile we want to recover the data from the old one. Best Buy wants $500 - $5,000 - which seems high to me. And they have no guarantee that the data is recoverable. My faith in them isn't high...

I called a couple of different companies that I found doing a Google search. One that sounds promising is Fields Data Recovery. Free shipping to them, and then the cost is $199 or more, probably around $300 - $400 but they don't charge anything without clearing it with us first.

Sounds good, but I'm wondering if they are reliable. Anybody know? Is a different company better? Lots of family photos and documentation is at stake, and we don't want this going to a second rate firm. Or one that will price gouge us.

I have never needed a service like this, so any and all advice is appreciated.

Thank you.

Lee

Try hooking up the hard drive to a usb to sata adapter, and then running Recuva (piriform's file recovery program, free).

Sorry, but that exceeds my level of technical expertise. I don't even know what a sata adapter is...

Really just looking to have a professional do this, and wondering if Data Recovery is a reliable company or if there is someone better.

Thank you.

Lee

Lee, download a Linux boot CD (always used to be Knoppix, probably want Ubuntu now) and shove that into your existing PC. That should allow you to at least try to look at the existing drive to see if it is actually ****ed or just won't boot, if it's the latter you can then start to grab what you need off it

Thank you, but I have 2 questions before I try this.

1. The drive is no longer in the laptop. Best Buy replaced the hard drive. We have the original, unopened, drive, but how do I connect it to a laptop?

2. Do I risk causing more damage and permanent data loss by trying this? The Best Buy Geek Squad guy seemed to think that this would be the case. Like I've said, I'm no geek so this is all new to me.

Lee

Was kind of assuming that when you said they were replacing the hard drive in the original post, they were going to do so once you'd considered your options, not that they've actually done it. The point of that exercise is to see if it just won't boot or if it's actually physically damaged, if you could still have seen files on the drive having booted from the CD then it's just a case of copying it to a new drive. To answer your questions:

1) You'd need to do what dfp said. It's literally just a $5-$10 cable, you plug one end into your hard drive and the other end into the laptop. If you can still see your files, job's fine, copy them onto the new drive. Absolutely worth doing this before spending actual $$$ on data recovery, it's the same idea as what I suggested for all intents and purposes

2) I wouldn't trust any random lackey in a large 'murican store, if it's not physically damaged then it's not going to do a thing, if it is then you'll find out within a couple of minutes when you try to access the drive and it doesn't work, and it's already past the stage where you're likely to get much off it cheaply anyway

And on that note I'll just back up my important files kthnx

Lot's of Youtubes in this space: https://www.youtube.com/results?sear...+laptop+drive+

This was also my thinking initially, Best Buy geek squad not knowing proper procedures or basic hdd recovery.

That said, they do employ a lot of techs with at least a CompTIA A+ cert, but not all of them are, it's kind of a crapshoot.

They also are not discreet with the information on your HD, I would never give them anything that had once held information I cared about.

buy one of these

use a usb cable to connect it to a working windows pc/laptop and access the files.

20 quid fix

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/HDD-...E&gclsrc=aw.ds

Thank you all for the suggestions. The cable fix sounds like something Best Buy already tried. It didn't work, at least for them.

It turns out that my wife's brother knows someone who does this sort of thing, so we're taking it to him, with our fingers crossed. Since the quotes we are getting start at around $300 and can go into the thousands, as you say, maybe this will work.

Lee