Can someone recommend a data recovery company

[megozilla13]

I know nothing about what is possible or not possible in data recovery. My house flooded last year and my computer was under water for about three days. It was salt water. I had about two years worth of family pictures that were not backed up. Does anyone know If I should even attempt to try and recover these. I've heard its very expensive, even if they can't recover anything. The computer has never been plugged in since the event. Has anyone ever had data from their hard drive successfully recovered and can recommend a company

mikej

[ctc]

Hmmmm....

The water might have trashed the drive. If you had a friend who was good with computers, you MIGHT be able to have them slave the drive to a functioning one to recover what you can. You MIGHT even be able to slap the drive into a computer and have it work.... but I would doubt it. Even if it did work, I wouldn't trust it. You have no way of knowing just how much damage was done to the drive.

Slaving the drive is more or less what a pro would do. It's expensive 'cos most shops charge high rates for service. (I've seen $100 an hour.)

Don C.

[Figuremod73]

This is definately for a pro. You need to send it to a specialist as soon as possible though. Salt water may corrod the innerds even quicker than regular water. A year later may be to late.

I read in one place it would actually be better to keep the drive in a sealed container with water to keep the corrosion down.

[johnmiic]

I went to a company in New York, NY named TekServe. I don't know if they do mail order but they have a walk-in location where they evaluate your drive to see if they can retrieve the data. They only revealed they use a "special software" to get the data back. They do it on premises and in my case they didn't seem to use a clean room situation. I had an old Mac, pre-Intel, drive retrieved and a Seagate 80 gig HD recalled for over $100 each. They put the data on LaCie Rugged drives for me which all failed after use and wanted $1,000.00 for recalling that data again but I just re-submitted the original drives and they recalled the data, again, for the cheaper price.