Not sure on local places, but you could check out seagate's data recovery services: http://services.seagate.com/ You can try using their data recovery software for free, and if it detects it can recover the data from the drive, you can then purchase it for $130. Not sure how this compares with other data recovery services, but I know other places can get pretty expensive (in the 1000's). If you can, always make a copy of the drive and work on restoring data from the copy. You want to preserve the original disk as much as possible. The easiest way to make a 1:1 copy of a drive would be dd dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb (sda = original disk, sdb = blank disk) Good luck, Andy On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 10:44 AM, Mike Miller <mbmiller at taxa.epi.umn.edu>wrote: > This question is about local places that can do data recovery work, so it > would probably apply to any OS, but my friend with a problem today > happened to be running Windows XP on a Dell laptop. > > What local computer pros might be able to get some data off of this HDD? > Here's what happened: > > The Dell laptop's HDD had failed during the summer and the drive was > repartitioned. Just the other day my friend left the laptop running and > went for a cup of coffee. When she got back it had powered down, or was > on standby, or was hibernating, or something. She went to press the power > button but accidentally pressed the "Media Direct" button which is right > next to the power button and looks just like it. Unfortunately, that > small mistake marked the end of her working laptop. After that it > wouldn't boot, Ubuntu Live CD couldn't mount the drive, and Windows XP > install CD said that the drive needed to be reformatted. > > I got out BartPE and ran "chkdsk c: /r". It ran and when it was done I > could look at the drive using Ubuntu Live CD, but I could not find any of > her data. It still will not boot to Windows and says "NTLDR is missing". > > So who in the Twin Cities might be able to find some of her files? > > Mike > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20081125/100057a1/attachment.htm