Gotta drive that kicked the bucket today. There was TONS of shite on this thing. It fires up, and then goes click only to stab my heart every time the arm tries to kick over to read. I know there are tons of places you can find on google that handle this sort of thing for a super hefty price tag, but it is a price that can get subsidized.

You guys use any of these companies before and if so, which would you recommend?

No I never did but if you can get it to run for 20mins or just be recognized by your system easy recovery pro is the best solution for me, give it a try before you pay some big company: OnTrack Easy Recovery Pro

Good luck!

Unlucky dude, it sucks to lose your hard drive. Happened to me a few years back and now I habitually backup my stuff to a separate drive on a weekly basis, just in case :P

Physically recovering data from hard drives is no easy task. I don't think you're likely to get much of a discount.

One trick that can sometimes work is putting the drive in an airtight sealed bag and stick it in the freezer for a few hours (contracts the platters so the drive can be read again). Depends on the fault with the drive, though - sounds like yours might be a mechanical one.

Ive had luck with the freezer trick too - dont know why it works, but it seems to work on a variety of problems with drives. Ive used 1 company to recover some data that was lost when a workstation got fried here at work, but in all honesty I dont feel it was worth it. My boss had a stiffy to get the data back, but for a single drive I think they charged us near $900 and we only got half the data back... I could have recreated most of what was lost for less than we spent on the recovery. Ill try to find the name of the company I used for ya tho - they were out in CA somewhere.....

-N

edit: i should read before i write
freezer trick brings many hdds to life
but putting a cooler pad on it while running makes them live longer (after freezing)

Thanks for the tips guys! I've heard of the freezer trick before, so I'll give it a shot. It wasn't a drive I worked off all the time, it was mainly for just storage that got used here and there, but it was internal. Just gonna chalk it up to bad luck and I may need to look into a new case with better cooling or just making it external if I get it up and running to retrieve the data.

It was a Western Digital. Any recommendations on good reliable brands you guys have found?

WD is pretty reliable but I guess every drive here or there fails. I've always stuck with seagates and WDs though since they are the big brands. I had an external WD(mybook) fail on my though and the recovery price was ridiculous. It was upwards a thousand for a 250 gig drive and just didn't feel it was worth it. It caused me to back up my data on like 3 drives now, if I had the money I would go for one of the off site services too haha, damned hard drives.

there are only several brands of drives out there and all are pretty much in common use, so there's no 'one smaller' brand than another...

I've gone through about 14 hard drives in the last 10 years, most thankfully retire after long hard, reliable service, but I've had drives from every make fail or go bad.

maxtor was the worst though.. 4 drives 3 failures.

One of the things you can do is that if you have an identical drive, is you can swap the platters to another drive and get the data off that way, but this kind of work needs to be carried out in a 100% dust free environment.