Dead hard drives and missing data

Laptop dead

My laptop suddenly went off last week, and since that was completely dead and unresponsive. I took it to AMRS (a liverpool laptop/apple repair shop) who told me it could be an issue with the logic board or the topcase, for which the repair would be around 800 so I decided rather than repair it to get a new laptop. However, I have loads of REALLY important files which I never backed up on that laptop, they are a couple of years work which I really can't afford to lose! The repair shop gave me a "Solid State Drive"/Flash Storage for the laptop with the data on and then referred me to you and said you should be able to retrieve the files from that drive. It may also be worth noting that when he plugged in the drive to his laptop and tried to run it on there, once I entered my password around half way through loading his laptop would shut down. I am desperate to get this data back so would love to come drop off the solid state drive for you to see what you can do with it.

 

Overheated laptop

My laptop overheated today and when I tried to load it I had the error message: 'Operating system not found'. I force shut down and let it cool but had the same error message each time I tried to power up. This has happened once before after overheating (two months ago), I was able to switch it back on after a few attempts and it has continued to work since then until now. It's a Sony Vaio PCG-3C1M. I got it in early 2009 so it's very old. I did a data backup a couple of years ago, but obviously I've added quite a few more photos and docs since then that I want to recover. The laptop itself has enormous sentimental value so if it could be brought back to life for use that would be incredible. I've removed the battery and left it alone because I don't want to cause any more damage. It would be great to get some advice

 

Power surge on PSU

There was a PSU problem which caused a power surge. The disk now does not work but you can hear it trying to spin up but no clicking. Its a Samsung SP200c 200Gb HD SATA and was wondering if you could quote me either for a fix or total recovery.

 

Need to recover RAW image files

I've been doing some travelling and copied over about 130gb of images to a lacie rugged drive. I safely ejected it and the next morning when I plugged it in it says that the drive cannot be recognised. I've run two software recovery programmes — the Seagate one and Data Rescue. Both took around 13hours to scan and then didn't bring up any of the latest data — just old images from another project. The drive initialises but won't mount. Is this something you guys could look into? I'm particularly looking for one folder ('canada') which has a substantial amount of .RAW images. They were all copied over beginning 14th September, but all that shows up are the really old things. If you could let me know what's possible and a rough estimate of cost that'd be great.

 

Card not compatible with computer

I have a MicroSDXC used in a camera and we have a problem that a large portion of our photos have vanished from our recent holiday. I am not sure what has happened. One minute they were there and then the card was saying that it wasn't compatible with my computer and then the camera in which it had previously worked. My girlfriend managed to get it to work on her ipad and has imported a lot of the phots but we are still missing quite a few and would like to have them recovered. I work very close to your Lombard Street location and could drop the SD card into the office in person and for speed.

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Hard Disk Drive
This is a hard disk drive. These are the things that store all the data from your computers, tablets and phones. There are billions of them in the world, but most people know absolutely nothing about them.