Apparent physical damage to hard drive

[PattyS]

Okay, I'm not a technical person. When my daughter's laptop got the blue screen of death I took it to the Geek Squad at Best Buy. She had pictures from a family vacation that I really want. The Geek Squad said it kept "locking up their data recovery system". They could not get anything off of it. They recommending sending it into the Data Recovery department for a $60 diagnostic fee and then additional charges if they can recover anything.

If they could not recover it with their software in the Service Department, is there any reason to believe software I can download from ZAR will? Just want to be realistic.

I did try your free download to see if I could go back to the camera memory card and get the photos. Great Tool! It did get some but she had taken a lot more photos so I guess the majority of them had already been overwritten. :(

Suggestions?

[Alexey V. Gubin]

Realistically, Geek Squad is using similar software; supposing there is a physical-type problem, there is little chance something can be gained by using ZAR.

If you are going to send it off to the data recovery service, then send it.
If you are not planning the recovery, you can still try ZAR, or whatever, till the drive deteriorates completely. In the latter case, concentrate on creating and "image file" of the drive - this allows you to get a permanent snapshot of the drive state. This snapshot may be less than perfect, but at least it allows unlimited retries and does not deteriorate over time.