Its sorta one of my hobbies, I work in IT, but not this field. I know a lot about it when we used to do it at work and also knowing the eForensics rules and trying my best never having to go to court and testify about chain of custody issues with users laptops, drives, phones, etc.
Work now uses Data (Drive?) Savers and our bill is usually between $5-10k depending on how bad it is and the rush.
You said clicking, so that means mechanical. Do you know if your drive is seen in BIOS/device manager? What part of Houston are you in?
Either way, quit using it until you figure out your next move.
I haven't checked the BIOS. I can see it in Windows Explorer and sometimes it will show files and sometimes it won't. I tried using a drive recovery software but it's horribly frustrating and just seems to stay in "refreshing" mode for hours on end.
Just want to pay a pro to do it at this point and save my photos. It's my only kid growing up and I can't replace them.
I haven't checked the BIOS. I can see it in Windows Explorer and sometimes it will show files and sometimes it won't. I tried using a drive recovery software but it's horribly frustrating and just seems to stay in "refreshing" mode for hours on end.
Just want to pay a pro to do it at this point and save my photos. It's my only kid growing up and I can't replace them.
When you see it you could try copying at least some of the files off of it.
I would personally start with a tool to extract an image, and work from that. But I understand frustration if you don't do this often. In general independent shops are less expensive than drive savers but not all are competent. I would consider using Rossman repair in austin. Or you can watch his series on werecoverdata on youtube. While you contemplate who to use.
Buy an external drive enclosure and see if you can browse the files on another pc
You don't really want to do that on a failing drive. Unless you have a tool to prevent mounting, I'd recommend not doing anything with the drive unless you know what you're doing.
if it's mechanical, you're more likely to make the situation worse just trying things to get anything off.
i used to recover lots of drives going all the way back to RLL and MFM drives. If it's a head issue on a modern drive, you need a "clean room" type environment just to see what's happening inside the drive. Many drives use inert gasses as well inside the drive enclosure.
Louis Rossmann operates in Austin and has a good reputation for this type of problem. If its clicking, I would guess mechanical, in which case they can remove the platters, put them into a new drive enclosure, repack with argon(?) and seal it back up. The more you power it on, the more likely you are to lose the data completely.
He was in NY for a long time repairing macs, and streaming the videos on how to do it. He had just dropped quite a bit of money on moving to a new location when COVID hit, and ended up leaving NY for good.
His biggest motivation is right to repair and treating customers well. You would do well to at least reach out to him and see what they suggest.
He recently had a video about data recovery shops that populate google maps with dozens of locations in an area. They are largely fronts, in front of a WeWork type office, where the drives are dropped off and shipped elsewhere to try and recover, with a poor reputation of returning the drives if you decide it's too expensive or risky for them to try and recover it.
Does the throw-it-in-the-freezer trick work still?
It can.
I have an old drive that was dropped. It won't even try to spin up unless its been in the freezer. Even then it tries three times and shuts down, but at least it tries.
One of these days I'll send it off for recovery even though its just old stuff from when I was a student at A&M and .mp3s.
I still don't understand why people are relying on physical disks these days for critical things. I mean I have my things backed up onto some external hard drives, CDs, Flash Drives, etc, but that is the zombie apocalypse backup in case my cloud providers get destroyed, and yes I keep things in multiple cloud providers for same reason.
Last time I heard, only mechanical drives are allowed for evidence archiving. Ie, anything that has to sit long term isn't trusted on CD, flash, SSD, etc.
All my home backups are on RAID systems with mechanical drives. They get used once or other year or so and I have more faith that they will work and have data on them than SSD that have been sitting without power that long.
Last time I heard, only mechanical drives are allowed for evidence archiving. Ie, anything that has to sit long term isn't trusted on CD, flash, SSD, etc.
All my home backups are on RAID systems with mechanical drives. They get used once or other year or so and I have more faith that they will work and have data on them than SSD that have been sitting without power that long.
Drives that use memory instead of a hard drive need to be plugged in to keep the data in storage. I've read that SSD drives and flash drives will be losing data after a year or so. They work by storing electrons in the transistors and the transistors will leak electrons over time.
At the very least, each SSD drive and flash drive should be plugged in every few months to freshen the transistors.
On my own computers, I prefer a standard hard drive for day to day use and will store data that hardly ever changes on SSD drives and I keep them plugged in.
Bit rot is a real thing and the proclivity is greater with solid state devices than with physical media - but even that depends greatly on environment.
I agree with those who have multiple failure mode protection, not the least of which is not relying on human intervention/prevention as undesirable. Not everyone has the means, knowledge, or capability for appropriate hardening, but at least non-on-premise backup is a better failsafe than nothing or even local physical copies for most.
Personally I have a 100TB NAS running ZFS with L2ARC and ZIL on separate storage pools in a RAIDZ (60 equivalent) configuration for primary storage of anything critical. All assets that store data in my house use this as their backup/storage location. This unit has automated backups to Amazon Glacier storage for redundancy. This is probably overkill for most, but certainly provides high protection/lowered risk for data loss which is my primary concern. [Note for those who care: It's not its only job (it also serves up other services like multimedia, NVR, Virtualization) which contributes to its size.]
Just had an SSD controller die on me and rendering a 4TB drive dead. Reminded me of this thread. One of those "Chances are very small, but never zero" kinda thing. Bummed. Was my Steam drive and I had a LOT of data there not backed up on cloud. I haven't even begun to think about how much hours of playtime is lost on there.
Nearly any situation is at least partially recoverable…just depends on how much you want to spend to get it back. Reputable places exist that will even take donor components and resolder them onto damaged devices to attempt recovery. The pain comes when you know you are paying for the possibility, not the guarantee of success.
If you choose this route, don't cheap out on lowest cost provider. Your odds decrease exponentially using fly-by-night/amateur services.
Ie, it sees the drive but says its not formatted or unrecognizable or dead like it's not seen in bios/device manager, etc?
The NVME controller on it died. Literally the only thing that can see it is Device Manager only to tell me it's not working properly. Looked at replacing the chip but seems to be hardcoded to not be able to be swapped. Bought it three years ago and looked at prices these days and my God…. I knew they were bad but knowing it and then actually pricing it for oneself are two different things.
