- Joined
- Nov 14, 2003
Welp, haven't had a drive failure in quite a long time, but at least this time it wasn't my fault. 
I moved across the country about 4 years ago due to a not great divorce, and in the process the moving company didn't handle a lot of my stuff correctly, including my main PC at the time. I had been putting off sorting this out until this past week(emotions and memories suck), and I guess that was my first major mistake with it. The chassis itself got pretty beat up but not exactly crushed, however the components inside were basically e-waste. The GPU (2070) somehow broke free and caused all kinds of destruction, including ripping the PCI-E socket off the board, smacking the memory around enough that it too was dislodged from their sockets to the point of the heat spreaders separating from the chips and just rattling around the case, and the HDD tray decided to come loose and join the party as well at some point. Ironically the CPU/heat sink were fine, as I thought to unmount them before the move because I've seen horror stories of heat sinks causing all kinds of damage during shipping, but never a vid card...
Everything was tossed except for the SSD which was fine but I'll probably never trust it to serve OS duties again, and two of the three WD Black drives are somehow unscathed, but similarly they'll never see critical data storage use again. The last WD Black drive however has been giving me trouble all week, and suddenly began to either fail to be detected completely, or just leave entire folders inaccessible. These drives were a panic effort to back up what I could from my old NAS that my now ex-husband decided last minute he was keeping for himself. I am basically prepared to have to send out this drive unless I'm missing something, but I'm pretty sure this is a head crash that's going to cost all of the money.
The drive has my entire music collection and a ton of old games that I'm pretty sure won't even run on Windows 10/11, but the folder I actually care about is the Pics folder with all of my family pictures on it. Some 25+ years of history that I need back.
SOOO after this wall of text I guess I'm looking for recommendations for companies that are proficient with this type of repair/restoration, as I haven't needed to do something like this in AGES and most of the places I find when looking up this type of work look sooooo scammy lol.
Any help or ideas are appreciated as always.
I moved across the country about 4 years ago due to a not great divorce, and in the process the moving company didn't handle a lot of my stuff correctly, including my main PC at the time. I had been putting off sorting this out until this past week(emotions and memories suck), and I guess that was my first major mistake with it. The chassis itself got pretty beat up but not exactly crushed, however the components inside were basically e-waste. The GPU (2070) somehow broke free and caused all kinds of destruction, including ripping the PCI-E socket off the board, smacking the memory around enough that it too was dislodged from their sockets to the point of the heat spreaders separating from the chips and just rattling around the case, and the HDD tray decided to come loose and join the party as well at some point. Ironically the CPU/heat sink were fine, as I thought to unmount them before the move because I've seen horror stories of heat sinks causing all kinds of damage during shipping, but never a vid card...
Everything was tossed except for the SSD which was fine but I'll probably never trust it to serve OS duties again, and two of the three WD Black drives are somehow unscathed, but similarly they'll never see critical data storage use again. The last WD Black drive however has been giving me trouble all week, and suddenly began to either fail to be detected completely, or just leave entire folders inaccessible. These drives were a panic effort to back up what I could from my old NAS that my now ex-husband decided last minute he was keeping for himself. I am basically prepared to have to send out this drive unless I'm missing something, but I'm pretty sure this is a head crash that's going to cost all of the money.

The drive has my entire music collection and a ton of old games that I'm pretty sure won't even run on Windows 10/11, but the folder I actually care about is the Pics folder with all of my family pictures on it. Some 25+ years of history that I need back.
SOOO after this wall of text I guess I'm looking for recommendations for companies that are proficient with this type of repair/restoration, as I haven't needed to do something like this in AGES and most of the places I find when looking up this type of work look sooooo scammy lol.
Any help or ideas are appreciated as always.
