Help needed

well, long time lurker, first time poster, and not under the circumstances of anything good.. One of my harddrives crashed on me the other day. Its bad enough that I have to send it off to get the info back from it. The only thing is I had vids on there from galistin at one time, those were wiped (35 pass), but others I found from nonudeclub are still on there. This is a drive with ALL my mp3's family pics and other videos on it. I fear sending the drive off to a data recovery place, does anybody know of a private data recovery center?

Have you tried to recover the stuff yourself? If not, go to download.com and search for "hard drive recovery" and see what you come up with. There should be some free programs that that you could try.

well, the drive is inaccessible. It is recognized by the BIOS but that's as far as it goes, the directory is unreadable. Any program I try to use on it locks the computer up. I put it on an external drive and turned everything off in the room and turned it on and can't hear it spin up, just a soft click.. click....... click.. click...... This is on an WD Raptor too btw. I don't know if it is spinning up and I just can't hear it or what.

If it is just the file system or partition that is fried then you should give GetDataBack (http://www.runtime.org/) a try. You can download the trial version and see whether it is able to recover your data before you buy.

But if the hardware itself is broken then you're out of luck. The only tip i know of, but haven't tried myself, is to put the drive in the refrigerator (wrapped in a plastic bag!) for a couple of hours. This is supposed to help if the cause of the failure was overheating.

Good Luck!

Well, I hope I'm not screwed too bad. If the vids I had on there from Galitson and like 4 others I had were wiped off using BCWipe (35 passes) then the data should be completely unretreivable. However the rest of the vids I had on there only a handful were from Nonudeclub.com I kept this drive specifically clean of too much porn for just such an event as this. What I fear is that somebody starts looking through the files and thinks they are questionable and raises a flag. I am almost **** to send the drive off. For the past 3 days I've looked up ALL the possibilities of doing it myself at home but that's going to be impossible. I did have a whole handful of FLV files I had downloaded from the NNclub but also wiped them. I'm just curious, what would you guys do if you were in my shoes?