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About 5 or 6 years ago I had a laptop HDD go bad on me (wouldn’t boot anymore). I removed the HDD and have had it stored away since then because it has almost all of our pictures/videos of my son’s very early years. It is very important to my wife and me, obviously.
Recently I tried to connect it to my PC using a SATA cable, but I could not get BIOS to recognize the disk exists. I can hear/feel the HDD spin, but no matter what connections I used I could not get BIOS to see it.
Considering the importance of the data I sent it to werecoverdata.com and paid a $95 diagnostics fee.
The quote I was provided was $1750, (the cheapest of the time frame options). I asked what the issues were and this is what I was told: “The hard drive is unstable and has System Area issue.”
I’ve done some googling and see a lot of references to programs that allegedly fix unstable sectors, which I’m assuming is what “unstable” means. System Area doesn’t mean much to me.
Ultimately I need the data off of the HDD, but $1750 seems pretty steep, especially if they just run some program I can download for $50 to get the data off.
I could really use some other opinions, ideas, thoughts on this price.
Answer: It is entirely up to you whether your data is worth it to you. They should give you a guarantee of data recovered or no (or minimal) charge.
I had a drive with apparently a catastrophic failure that I gave to an agency (they quoted about $1,100 but charge only a nominal charge if no data recovered). No data was recovered and I paid the small charge. Fair all around.
Followup note based on discussion here: I would add the that the quote you got is reasonable and is not a “rip-off”. ?Charges are made for clean room, analysis and labor.