Data Recovery

[mooching]

The hard drive on my son's laptop has messed itself up, and our local computer shop techies, having had it on "recovery" for two weeks, now say they can't recover any of the data from it, but that what my son could do is send the hard drive off to a specialist company for a free quote to see if they can get any of it back. My son is especially keen to get his photos back and also his ITunes (having spent quite a bit on buying ITunes songs).

Has anyone here tried any of these specialist companies and would you recommend them? We've found one online that charges £97, but don't know whether or not they are reliable and have a good reputation/success rate.

[Sharon]

Sorry can't help with the data recovery, but with Itunes, when you sign back into your account everything he's purchased will still be available to download again.

[carolinemaltas]

My daughter dropped her external hard drive which unfortunately broke. She took it to the techie department of her University ( Newcastle) and they quoted £350 to extract the data. We then tried PC world and they quoted £550 both said the data had to be tretrieved in "Sterile" conditions and it was very slow and labour intensive. Hope you have a better deal than that and if you do let me know!
Good luck.

[mooching]

Found this one on a google search, which quotes hard drive recovery from £97, but have no idea whether or not they're reliable.

http://www.rapid-data.net/

[Bluebell]

My old Vaio died completely last year, beyond repair but the 'computer man' I use recovered all the data and saved to disc for £40

[mooching]

Sorry can't help with the data recovery, but with Itunes, when you sign back into your account everything he's purchased will still be available to download again.

I'm a bit of a dummy (well a complete one actually!) with regard to ITunes, so could you humour me and talk me through how he'd do this? I mentioned it to my dd who said that you only sign into your account when you go to update your iPod, and of course he can't do that now. Could you explain what you mean? Or do you mean sign into the Store?

[Sharon]

You can sign in to Itunes on another computer, using your log in details which you used when purchasing the music, everything will still be there and you can download it all again as it's already paid for.

[MegandMolly]

Does he have all his music on an ipod? If so, can't he sync the ipod to a different computer and transfer the music back to the new computer hard drive that way??

[mooching]

Does he have all his music on an ipod? If so, can't he sync the ipod to a different computer and transfer the music back to the new computer hard drive that way??

I don't know!  Can he do that? It would just need to be to his new hard drive.

[MaggieR]

Yeah he should be able to do that - he would just need to authorise his new computer within his itunes account to be able to play music purchased.....

As for getting the stuff back down from itunes

If You've purchased music from the iTunes store,
Go here:http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/store/lostmusic/
Go to the bottom of the page, Click Contact US