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. :)

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.

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.

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

Well its up to you we can give it a crack got a few tricks up our sleeve have saved quite a lot of info over the years. PM me if you want to send it will reply with postal details.

Why not choose this free data recovery software? It was $69.95 before, now it is free for windows users. It is compatible with latest Windows 7, it can recover deleted files or lost files e mptied from the Recycle Bin, formatted the partition even if you have reinstalled Windows, the partition was lost or the partition was deleted accidently, the file system of partition became RAW, partition cannot be accessed, hard drive was crashed, etc. I have tried it, it works well. But it ends at Feb 2010, I would like that it is free forever, download it

Yes that all sounds great but if he doesn't have a way of connecting the drive to another p.c or his laptop with new drive and O/S or have an external hard drive enclosure or laptop HDD to P.C IDE converter to suit SATA or IDE then its useless. If someone (a techy) said the drive is dead then freeware wont cut it especially since it will have limited abilities.

Good news:

$69.95 full version Data Recovery Wizard 4.3.6 is free now.
I have tried it and the download link still works.
Get it now.

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# Recover deleted or lost files emptied from the Recycle Bin.
# File recovery after accidental format, even if you have reinstalled Windows.
# Get data back from RAW hard drives.
# Get back files after a partitioning error.
# Disk recovery after a hard disk crash.
# Recover office documents, photos, images, videos, music, email, etc.

Spammer

I paid for a licence for ZAR. To recover a lost raid 3 months ago. It found ntfs headers and recovered eveeything. Love it. The freeware is ok too but can only recover 1 dir at a time.. Like the other guys are saying, if its a electrcal/ mechanical problem, then complexity and costs escalate.