I will be picking the drive up from the shop today. Thanks heaps everyone. :)

i usually do it for free for people, or for a box of beer if its a difficult one.

Sometimes mechanical failure can be unrecoverable unless you can find an identical drive to swap the platters and controller board into very carefully.

Send me the HDD carefully packaged if you know how to remove it, Other wise the laptop and power adapter. We will do what we know and trust to retrieve your data If i cant do it no charge if i can $50 flat fee. We can pass it on to a mate if we cant get it he has 15 years I.T experience compared to our 7 years.

So recently my laptop decided to crash. Took it to the shop, was told it was the hard drive and they were going to fix it and do a data recovery and whatnot. So I go to pick it up today and the data recovery was unable to be done. Now I am raging over this because I have a whole years worth of apprenticeship assignments/photos on there. So what I am asking is does anyone know of a fairly cheap data recovery specialist that could recover my data for me? Thanks heaps in advance. :)