DavidM Loc: New Orleans, LA

I bought the following docking station which reads the most common size drives. Works perfectly!

https://www.amazon.com/iDsonix-U3102-Drive-Docking-Station/dp/B00FDLCTQO?ie=UTF8&psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=ox_sc_sfl_title_1&smid=ABUMVW6VPC383

whitewolfowner

Your welcome, glad to help.

steve49 Loc: massachusetts

I'll bet you can get recovery from a local computer guy.
I had something similar and he recovered to a 500g drive that I use for backup now.
Cost not very much if I remember... under 100 including the new drive.

OnDSnap Loc: NE New Jersey

Why others and myself have always said...two drives minimum, 3 preferably for backups of data and system. (unfortunately the horse has left the barn, to late to close the doors) Anyway... I would check if it's card interface or the sata bridge, you can purchase a new enclosures... (not a bad idea to have one on hand when using externals)


http://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6121
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cTZBMi-XwQ

Szalajj Loc: Salem, NH

You should be able to remove the hard drive (which didn't fail) and install it in another computer to retrieve your files. But because it's a Dell, you may be limited to only Dell equipment to connect it to.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Some links -

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/how-to/a3086/hard-drive-recovery/
http://lifehacker.com/5951822/how-can-i-recover-data-from-a-dead-or-erased-hard-drive

Enclosure -
https://smile.amazon.com/Sabrent-External-Lay-Flat-Docking-EC-DFFN/dp/B013WODZH0/ref=sr_1_2?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1469270761&sr=1-2&keywords=hard+drive+enclosures

Drive -
https://smile.amazon.com/HGST-Deskstar-3-5-Inch-Internal-0S03664/dp/B00HHAJRU0/ref=sr_1_3?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1469273551&sr=1-3&keywords=hgst

billt1970 Loc: Gambrills, Maryland

I've had this happen twice. The first time it was the root hard drive on a laptop and the data was important enough that I had to cough up the $1,500 to send the 2.5" drive to Texas (don't recall the company name) to recover the data. VERY painful.

Recently, like earlier this month, I found a new much less expensive source, $300 Data Recovery in California. Now their service is different, but in this case it worked and they were able to recover 87% of the data on the hard drive. The difference in service is that the Texas company disassembled the hard drive in a clean room and installed the platters from my drive in a new case with good heads and controller and recovered from there. The $300 service does NOT disassemble the drive, but rather runs a comprehensive diagnostic to determine the root cause of the failure. In my case one of the 8 heads in the drive had failed. They were able to disable that head through firmware modifications and then recover all the data files that did not have any segments on that 8th platter.

I just got the drive back yesterday and what they did worked. This was great news as this drive had the only copy (I know, back everything up, TWICE!) of most of my photography from 2012 and 2013. The only downside is that any notions of the original file names and file structure are gone. That means that where I organized the files by camera, then year, then date and subject, with sub folders for the RAW and JPG and TIFF files, they come back recovered with all file types of the same extension in a folder structure; in plain English, the RAW files are all together and the JPGs all together and the TIFFs all together, etc.; plus the original file names are lost. The EXIF data appears to be intact, so I can determine the exposure date, camera, etc. I'm going to have to spend a lot of time reorganizing the files, BUT that's better than losing them all together.

Check out http://www.300dollardatarecovery.com/

BTW, if they can't recover any data, there is no charge. Check it out, and good luck!

Best Regards,

BT

Carl D Loc: Albemarle, NC.

This is why I switched to optical media, M-disc, outlasts any other known media and can't be corrupted. You don't have to worry about drive crashes and losing your data only what you didn't get while backing up to the drive. Much safer and more reliable to me.

NorthPacific

sorry for typos here...

re crashed HD

There are free software recovery that sometimes can work to recover data from a seemingly dead hard drive....here is one but there are quite a few that might be useful. If you have most of this in a cloud somewhere then you are miles and miles ahead of a total loss which is comforting to say the least. Data recovery from a totally shot HD however can run into over a thousand dollars or more at least... It is quite shocking what they can charge you!

free on line
https://www.piriform.com/recuva


here is a CNET review to some recovery options.....
http://download.cnet.com/s/data-recovery/

might be worth a try...


also I had a DELL laptop hd go bad a few months ago.....sometime it would intermittently work however..I did not have critical photos on it but I did have a lot photos downloaded from the internet as well as a lot of documents like camera instruction manual....The DEll laptop HDt was not reliable and only did work for brief periods..the giveaway which I ignored was a clicking sound the HD made that meant I should have STOPPED right there and recovered all my data files on-the-spot since when that click noise starts, things are never gonna get better...

I did bring it to a computer repair company to see what they could do but they were not gonna fiddle with it. But I did ask them that when they removed the HD what dock (toaster) did they use to work on it on their bench. The guy told me they use EZ-DOCK. This is a method a person suggested below but another brand and that was re a graphic card failure on a motherboard and was not related to the HD....meaning the HD was still OK.

Anyway, I went to Fry's and bought the single bay EZ-DOCK for 24 dollars....they do make a duel bay one for 36 dollars on Amazon...Anyway I bought the single bay one at Fry's and have since bought the double bay one on Amazon.

single bay
https://www.amazon.com/Kingwin-EZ-Dock-2-5-Inch-3-5-Inch-EZD-2535U3/dp/B00JKM0KUE

twin bay
https://www.amazon.com/Kingwin-2-5-Inch-3-5-Inch-Clone-EZD-2537U3/dp/B00N1QL9K0/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1469277576&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=EZ-Dock+double+baby

These are the easiest to use docks I have ever used in my life.....So I took the Dell bad hard drive and messed around with it by kind of jiggling it a bit in the slot and sure enough it would act normally for periods of time and I was then able to recover EVERYTHING on the hard drive that the repair company I brought it to could not since they were not going to sit there and jimmy that thing around to get it to work long enough to extract the information. I did go back to the store to the person who told me about the EZ-Dock they used and I told him that I was able to recover all my data and had it with me on a separate Transcend for proof.. They refunded me back the 69 dollar service fee which I guess they really did not have to but a rank amateur had done what they said they could not do....
https://www.amazon.com/Kingwin-EZ-Dock-2-5-Inch-3-5-Inch-EZD-2535U3/dp/B00JKM0KUE

I am not saying this will work for you and I realize it was lucky for me to have recovered what I did in the old way one used to jiggle around the rabbit ear antenna on a TV that responded to directional shifts and even your own body mass somehow helping the reception.....There was more "touch" involved than any kind of "science".

The hard drives in most laptops are 2.5 inch and in a desktop they are 3.5 inch and this EZ-DOCK takes both sizes.

So you have a few options here ....software data recovery.....taking it to a company that might be able to cheaply recover your data or much more advanced industrial/business grade data recovery companies that will charge you an outrageous sum of money or you can do some occult jimmy jack thing like I did by doing some Apollo 13 ad hoc unconventional attempt without spending a lot of cash (EZ-DOCK) and still at least have a cool external "toaster" anyway (and I would get the double bay one)....

I normally use Transcend external hard drives since they are military grade little beasts...also reasonably priced on Amazon.


The loss of original, valued image files is a disaster of the first order especially if you have spent time tweaking the images in PhotoShop since how do you put a value on that time spent and the unique/original efforts you did..?

As one person suggested the triple back up is good but you have that cloud solution going on which is great as long as that company remains in business....

Others have suggested and I follow that advice as well that since photo cards have come down in price, simply KEEP the original photo card you shot with and never use it again other than to retrieve some precious/special "shoot" you may have done... Also thumb flash drives have come way down in price and that is another option to also copy images to as well.

Of course the other caution is probably to use no more than a 8GB or 16 GB photo cards since if you tank a 32GB card, you may have destroyed vast numbers of entire costly projects..

The amount of strategies to protect images is pretty wide ranged if you think about it with the printing of the photo probably being the BEST insurance of archiving what you have done .....


I always fear for a lot of the smart phone people these days who take photos of their kids....sends them to everybody they know on the fly....then a few months later erase them to make room for more images they snap with their smart phones....meaning when their kids are 20 years old they might not even have a shoe box of photos of themselves....

The printing out of family photos like our parents did (I am 68) with prints and slides and we did for our kids with our film cameras is still the nearly foolproof archiving method particularly true with B/W photos.. Those old glossy B/W photos will probably survive a mass extinction asteroid hit. What's nice about a photo is that you can rescan it and make another digital image file of it which is nice if you no longer have the negative....and in the 1940's-1970's most consumers just tossed those negatives in the trash!!!

The failure of a hard drive can be consequential and it is GOOD to have raised the subject here so that all of us can take a step back and examine our own practices in this regard.....The sharing of different methods to recover data then forces us to review our archival practices and encourages others to weigh in with suggestions...

I have always made sure my two grand daughters not only have the digital on line images but I do the old fashion method and make them photo albums ....and a few coffee table photo books as well.

So anyway...good luck with your effort though you are one up on most to have them stored on a server somewhere ...... Losing images on a hard drive is about as bad as messing up while shooting the original photo in the first place....

We all have been there and done that......for family photos losing images is a catastrophe on so many levels.

I think our parents had it right re making prints.....In fact I KNOW they had it right.....

mas24 Loc: Southern CA

Wow, $1500. You must have been sick over paying that amount of money.

Morning Star Loc: West coast, North of the 49th N.

Because of personal experience, the first question I'd like to ask: Is it the drive itself that died, or is it one (or more) or the contact(s) or connection(s) in the box that holds the drive?

A few years ago my iOmega external bit the dust... I had been using it as my travel back-up and since we'd just come home from holidays there were a lot of photos on that drive that I had not copied anywhere else yet. I had a chat with one of the fellows at NCIX and he suggested I buy this gadget that has IDE and SATE connectors at one end, and a USB connector on the other end. The gadget cost me all of $20.00 (and that included sales tax!). He told me that because the external hard drives are in their own case, people often think it's the drive itself that died, when really it is only a contact.

Got home, opened the iOmega case, hooked up the gadget (sorry I don't recall the correct name) to the drive and to the computer, and was able to copy everything from that drive to my computer's hard drive. Later on, I got a new case, popped the drive in, closed the case and it's working fine again.

Oh, the one thing he also impressed on me: wear an anti-static wire, or do whatever needs to be done to prevent "sparks flying".

I'm sure this will not work for everyone, as sometimes it really is the drive that fails, but I figured for $20 it was worth a try - as opposed to a minimum of $100 for someone else to retrieve my photos.

Ed Chu Loc: Las Vegas NV

I accidentally deleted images off am SD card; Googled and found software that found "most" of the images; the images came up, but, to download, you then had to pay for the software, but it was pretty cheap; I noticed many Google response from companies; you might try one or two of the cheap ones before deciding to go to an expensive alternative.

Morning Star Loc: West coast, North of the 49th N.

Download and install "recuva" - free, both for finding and downloading images.
http://www.piriform.com/recuva
I recommend downloading from this site only - discovered the hard way that other sites will offer free software but include other "things" with it.

When I accidentally re-formatted a card before downloading the images from it, recuva got all of them back for me! Excellent little program and free as well !

photoman022 Loc: Manchester CT USA

Multiple hard drives are the way for you to go in the future. I have three which I continually back up. I've had two external hard drives die on me; each time I purchased a new one and backed up the files from one of the two remaining healthy drives. Backing up that way takes along, long time so do it at night (or start it during the day and walk away from the computer).

John_F Loc: Minneapolis, MN

Anyone know of any studies or tests of DVD and flash memory backup. I keep my vital stuff on two hard drives of which one does not run all the time. Trouble with DVD is you can't add new stuff. There are rewritable DVDs but don't you need a special optical drive and does Toast always get it right.