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LAPTOP data recovery

yawn - thing's buddy

11:06 / 02.07.07

alricht.......

fujitsu seimens amilo d laptop finally packed up last night (5 years old). It crashed while online - basically switched itself off - and i can't power it up anymore. no signs of life.

anyone know of a reasonably priced data recovery service in London (I live in east dulwich/peckham area)?

cheers

13:48 / 02.07.07

I'm not sure you can really put "reasonably priced" and "data recovery service" in the same sentence, these places tend to be aimed squarely at companies looking to recover business-critical data so the price of these services would seem, well, utterly ridiculous to a home user looking to get some Word docs and maybe some pictures back. It's possible of course that someone knows of a place that does cater more to the home market but I wouldn't hold your breathe.

Anyway, the first step in these circumstances is always to have a go yourself. The physical hard drive can be pulled out of the dead machine and connected as a slave drive to any other PC, if the drive itself was okay and it was some other critical failure that killed the laptop then all your data will be sitting there ready for the picking. Even if the drive was like a bit fucked you can still fix broken sectors, dodgy master boot records and even recover deleted files with freely available apps from t'internet so it doesn't hurt to have a go yourself.

13:59 / 02.07.07

If you have access to some other computer, it is definitely worth spending £10-£30 for a little kit to connect the laptop drive to another machine. Odds are, if you do this yourself and it works, you've saved yourself upwards of £100 in recovery fees. If it doesn't work, you've found out that things are so broken enough that the recovery fee would be much higher than that.

Some adapter thingies that might be helpful (assuming your laptop drive is IDE, not SATA):

2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapter

external enclosure

ONLY NICE THINGS

14:01 / 02.07.07

What Bamba neglects to mention there is that you have a laptop - Fujitsu-Siemens laptops, I think, use Toshiba Travelstar drives - if it's five years old, it will be a 2.5-inch IDE interface, I imagine. So, you won't be able to plug it into a desktop without a convertor, and you probably don't have a spare laptop kicking around, or anyone prepared to let you swap the drive into theirs.

So. If you have an IDE hard drive-based desktop with a spare drive bay, springing for a convertor is absolutely the way forward - they cost about a fiver. Otherwise, I would recommend taking out the hard drive and plugging it into a 2.5" IDE caddy - you can het these anywhere, but there is a computer fair in Bloomsbury on Saturdays where they are cheap and plentiful. It sounds from your description (no attempt to spin up the hard drive) like a power connection on your logic board has gone, which means the laptop is probably screwed but the hard drive probably fine. So, plug it into the caddy, connect to a USB port, you're basically sorted, and if it doesn't work you've only lost about £25 on the caddy. If you are not confident, any computer shop will be able to do something similar, and this is probably wroth trying before you start looking at Vogon-style data recovery.

ONLY NICE THINGS

14:09 / 02.07.07

Oops, jinx!

14:11 / 02.07.07

The fact that your machine didn't boot-up at all, rather than started booting then produced an error message, might suggest that the harddisk is fine and that you simply have a problem with the power supply or motherboard.

I'm sure it's relatively easy to find a data recovery company but as the previous poster has already said stated; it won't come cheap. A cheaper and quicker solution might be just take out the harddisk and try it on another machine to see whether you can still get your data.

(In my personal experience, people's data is rarely as expensive as the costs of recovery from a specialist.)

yawn - thing's buddy

09:16 / 03.07.07

thanks everyone - think I'll go for the caddy approach.

content however, is pretty valuable. I'm a journalist and have three years of architectural writing and photgraphy on it, mostly archived but probably a year's worth that isn't. (stoopid I know).

cheers!

ONLY NICE THINGS

09:44 / 03.07.07

Well, as long as you don't drop, break or magnetise the drive when you put it into the caddy, you should be OK.

Um... don't drop, break or magnetise the drive!

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

12:23 / 03.07.07

If you're nervous, there's probably a middle ground: bring your laptop into a computer repair place, explain the problem, and ask how much they would charge to plug your drive into a box and dump the data onto DVDs. If they just bill by the hour for actual work, you're talking about 45 to 90 minutes of labour plus whatever they charge for the storage medium, and you're paying regular computer-repair joes instead of "data recovery specialists."