Laptop HDD Failure

gurkirat.powar · September 28, 2019

I have a Dell Inspiron 5570 that I bought back in December 2017 to use for high school which I have been using on a regular basis ever since. This past Monday I was doing some light gaming on it and out of the blue the game became very slow and nearly unresponsive. I restarted the computer thinking it was some weird Windows bug and the computer booted up into Dell Support Assist and started scanning my drive for errors. Turns out my drive just failed randomly even though the laptop has never been dropped or has experienced any sort of shock that would cause damage to the actual components. I have a lot of personal data on my laptop such as photos and videos from a recent vacation that I had not gotten the chance to backup to an external drive and have exhausted every option available to me for software recovery. My scans come back telling me that the software has found bad sectors on the disk. I've contacted Dell and Costco (where I bought it from) and they are willing to repair the laptop but don't have the facilities to recover my data from the drive. Are there any cheap hard drive recovery solutions out there and are there any other options I can take to get my data back? I've done a lot of digging and almost every company is charging $600+ CAD for data recovery and local companies in the Lower Mainland are charging even more. Any help/advice would be appreciated.

P.S. I don't really care about the laptop as it is on the low end side and only care for the data on the actual drive.

Nord · September 28, 2019

As for software to recover HDD’s, you can find a ton of them via google, some even free.
However personally I would point you towards https://www.easeus.com. Trial probably works for a testrun.

For repair stores: https://store.rossmanngroup.com/data-recovery
And yes, that’s the louis rossmann. In your case I would say you are looking at tops 200$, more likely half.

Also this is somewhat relevant if you want to try to DYI it:

Though, if its only some dead sectors, I would be surprised if you can't get a majority of the data back by simply plugging the drive into a desktop PC as a secondary HDD and dragging everything over..