Data Recovery Services by Seagate Recovery Services

Notebook / Laptop Computers

1. Examples of Data Loss Situations

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Recovery from physical and logical damage due to mechanical and electrical failure, software corruption or human error.

• Dropped notebook - no longer turns on
• Inaccessible drives and partitions
• Applications that are unable to run or load data
• Corrupted data
• Virus
• Hard disk component failure
• Hard disk crashes
• Fire, water, coffee and other liquid damage
• Media surface contamination and damage
• Accidental reformatting of partitions
• Accidental deletion of data

2. The Recovery Process

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Initial diagnosis determines whether the media is accessible to our lab equipment. If so, the first priority is to create a raw image of the data on ActionFront media so that logical analysis can determine the nature of the data loss situation. If the media is inaccessible our lab will test the components and closely examine its internal health to determine the extent of physical damage.

Recovery of crashed hard disks often involves replacing failed or damaged components in a clean environment and using specialized hardware and software tools to create the raw image. Failed components typically include electronics, read/write heads, head assemblies, magnets & drive motors.

Logical recovery uses the raw image by examining the low-level data sectors and determining what fixes to filesystem structures are needed to get access to the important data. Sometimes the existing filesystem structures are missing or damaged so much that data has to be extracted directly from one or more fragments of the raw image.

ActionFront Data Recovery Labs programmers have created a full set of software tools used by our technicians to analyze, fix & recover data from raw images of all operating systems. Once a recovery has been successfully performed, file lists are created and data validity is checked.

3. Recovery Pricing for Notebook / Laptop Hard Drives

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Each data recovery case has its own unique characteristics. The price of any case is determined by two main factors:
1. The cost of components.
2. The total lab time spent on the case and what proportion of the work is done by junior, intermediate or senior technicians.

Other factors affecting the price quote are:

The historical lab success rate on a certain type of data loss situation on a particular model. Note that there is no charge at all if the data cannot be recovered; hence the costs involved in attempting the recovery are borne at our risk. Where we enjoy a higher probability of success (and thus lower risk) the price quote may be lower than those cases with a lower probability of success and higher risk.
Significant R&D is required to keep up with the technological developments in the drive industry. Pricing for newer data loss problems on newer models will be higher than the pricing for mainstream problems on more common models.

More Information about Pricing for Single Hard Drive Recoveries.

The actual price of any case is determined by two main factors:
The cost of components.
The total lab time spent on the case and what proportion of the work is done by junior, intermediate or senior technicians. In turn, the amount of lab time and seniority of staff needed are affected by:

1. The File-system type. (Various Windows systems such as FAT32 and NTFS, MAC or UNIX)
2. The degree of file-system rebuilding required. This is the amount of logical repair work required for an external recovery or as the follow-up steps for an internal recovery.

Other factors affecting the price quote are:

The historical lab success rate on a certain type of data loss situation on a particular model. Note that there is no charge at all if the data cannot be recovered; hence the costs involved in attempting the recovery are borne at our risk. Where we enjoy a higher probability of success (and thus lower risk) the price quote may be lower than those cases with a lower probability of success and higher risk.
Significant R&D is required to keep up with the technological developments in the drive industry. Pricing for newer data loss problems on newer models will be higher than the pricing for mainstream problems on more common models.

4. Turn-Around Time

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ActionFront has geared its entire service to recover your data as fast as possible. When dealing with such a wide variety of problems, estimating time before the problem is diagnosed is difficult. That is why each recovery case starts with a diagnostic evaluation.

The evaluation is started immediately on receipt of the media and generally takes 2 to 24 hours to complete. The process involves several hours of work and testing. (Mirroring alone may take up to 24 hours of computer time with extensive re-tries for badly damaged devices.)

Complete recovery turn-around time including analysis and recovery is usually between 1 and 5 days. Some severe cases can take considerably more time.

Our hours of operation are 9am to 7pm EST Monday to Friday (All Labs), 9am to 5pm Saturday (Toronto Lab only). If you have an emergency situation, we have technical staff on call for weekends and after hours in all locations.

Time estimates are based on procedures and expertise required to recover the data you require. You are not charged by the hour. A firm quote is provided for your approval following the evaluation.

5. Hard Drive Brands, Models and Interfaces

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ActionFront services all hard drive brands, models and interfaces. What follows is a comprehensive list. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to call.

EIDE and IDE drives from all manufacturers including Western Digital, Seagate, Quantum, IBM, Maxtor, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Samsung, Conner, Micropolis, JTS, Digital, NEC, Compaq, Digital, Kalok, Fuji, Areal and JVC using 2.5" laptop & 3.5" Normal 40 pin ATA through to the UDMA6 interface.

SCSI drives from all manufacturers including Seagate, Quantum, IBM, Western Digital, Fujitsu, Digital, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Micropolis, Maxtor, CDC, Imprimis, Conner, Epson, Rodime, Toshiba, Samsung, Hitachi and NEC using Normal SE, UW, Differential (WD), LVD, Hot Swappable (SCA) and 2.5" laptop interfaces.

Fibre Channel drives from Seagate and IBM with FC (1Gigabit Copper) interfaces.

ESDI, RLL & ST/MFM drives from all manufacturers including Seagate, Western Digital, Conner, Fujitsu, Maxtor, Miniscribe, Quantum, Tandon, Fuji, Toshiba, IBM, Kalok, Micropolis, Priam, Microscience, Tandon, JTS, Kyocera, LaPine and Tulin.

MCA drives from IBM, Western Digital and Seagate with IBM ST-506 & ESDI and 2.5" laptop ESDI interfaces.

PCMCIA Type I, II, III hard drives from IBM, Western Digital, Integral Peripherals and Procomm.

1.8" ATA-5 drives from Toshiba and Hitachi

CF+ Type II IBM Microdrives

6. Preserving your Warranty

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ActionFront has established agreements with most hard drive manufacturers regarding preserving warranty during data recovery service. See List of Manufacturers. If your manufacturer is not in the list, please call as ActionFront has agreements with additional manufacturers which have requested us not to post their company name.

If the seals on a hard drive must be broken in order to extract data from the drive, ActionFront will re-seal the media upon completion of service with a tamper resistant sticker which the manufacturer will accept for warranty purposes. You will also receive an invoice receipt to indicate you have pursued data recovery services with ActionFront.

How to Submit a Recovery Case

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Fill out the Online Evaluation Request form or the Printable Evaluation Request form and send it to ActionFront with your notebook, laptop or preferably just the hard drive for recovery.

Shipping locations are indicated on the Request Forms. Driving directions with maps can be found here.

Careful packaging is important to perserve delicate electronics like hard drives. See Packaging Instructions to help avoid shipping damage.

Critical Response Services

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If you have a critical situation and need immediate help, Call Us. The Critical Response Service is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

In Lab Service

This service is for mission critical data recovery, where the media can be taken to one of our labs. In the lab, dedicated resources and critical response team members are committed round the clock to your recovery case until its resolution.

Onsite Service Q

This service is available for situations where immediate shipping to one of our labs is not feasible or desirable. A tech or team of techs can be dispatched to stabilize and analyze the circumstances of your failure. Response is as fast as it takes to catch the next plane to your location. This service is not for everybody but if you have a situation that merits this level of service, ActionFront is ready to help.

The Critical Response Team is comprised of our best data recovery technicians. They are called on for every kind of situation imaginable from multiple drive multi-Gigabyte and Terabyte RAID servers , Jukeboxes, custom installations and configurations, SQL Database corruption, to tape failure and custom file extraction from corrupted backup sets. Whatever the situation, these techs are ready to help.