Recovery Force® Data Recovery Forum

The number of opened HDDs continues to increase and I have the feeling it will only get worse. There just doesn't seem to be a cure.
Last week I received a Seagate ST2000LM015 and the foil seal had been removed and discarded.

I also received a call from a computer shop owner that said he had trouble unsticking the heads on a HDD and he might send it to us. When I asked him if he had opened the hard drive he said yes but:
1) He only opens hard drives in the dark because he doesn't want to expose the platters to light.
2) His shop IS a dust free environment.

1) He only opens hard drives in the dark because he doesn't want to expose the platters to light.
2) His shop IS a dust free environment.

LOL! Some of those drives are blood-suckers, and mysteriously die when exposed to light.

Yeah, it seems that we get at least one DIY butchered case a week, these days. Just had a tech contact me about a case, shaking his head. The recovery was a little too complex for him and his resources and he suggested to his client that he outsource it to a data recovery pro. The client said that they might just do that, but first they have a friend who said that they want to try it first. What could ever go wrong with that?

"...What could ever go wrong with that?" Probably will result in DIY Data Recovery, much Sadder And True
I'm slowly adjusting my comments in other forums to match the concept: assume a HD has a physical failure or a physical failure is imminent until proven otherwise, if one absolutely cannot afford to send HD to a DR company/specialist, then DIY very very carefully under the direction of any Data Recovery person in the end-user's area.

Then there are the never ending cases of completely overwritten hard drives by techs trying to fix OS issues. They send the client's drive back with a "fixed" computer without their data and when the client comes to us for data recovery, 99 times out of 100, the drive has bad sectors which would have been the root cause of the OS issues in the first place.

Client paid for:

1. tech to lose and overwrite their data
2. tech to not diagnose and fix their original issue
3. for a partial data recovery
4. lost time and revenue resulting from lost data

Sadly, there have been very few technicians who take responsibility for their mistakes and, at the very least, offer to cover the cost of the recovery.

We, at Recovery Force, work very hard to try and educate technicians who use our service on how to avoid causing, or compounding the effects of, data loss. But, we still seem to get such cases several times a month.

Charge an open drive fee and techs and DIY people will eventually stop doing this silliness.
Word will eventually get around that's it's not to be opened and poked at.

I tell all my clients to give Best Buy a bad google review and berate the manager on the phone for allowing techs to open their drives without proper knowledge to do the job.

I often tell them to try and get BB to pay for the recovery or at least some of it for their stupidity.

We don't charge for the open drive, but will charge a fee to clean it before we can start our assessment, if we find it dirty inside.

The Best Buy in my neck of the woods has been pretty good to refer clients my way, without messing things up.

I have had a few that had been to Best Buy first and none of them had been opened. They were quoted for outsourced recovery and it was too much. I'm guessing there is a rogue employee out there, I hope they are not OK with their techs opening hard drives.

Yeah, in the Best Buy in my neck of the woods they open it up just to move the "needle", just in case its stuck. Even if it's clicking . Lucky me