The tools you enumerated need a lot of training for you or your data recovery specialists, particularly PC-3000 products.

So firstly you should pay attention to the level of expertise in data recovery that you and your staff have. Try to sign at least one DR expert and he will help fix the list of necessary hardware and software.
_________________
Vitaliy Mokosiy
Atola Technology 

I agree with all the previous posts about having knowledge and experience before starting a data recovery lab. However, speaking just to the equipment purchase part of the question, if I were starting a DR business, I would buy a DeepSpar Disk Imager and a couple of the leading software recovery products. With these, you can get probably 75% of the DR cases that will come in.

I don't work for DeepSpar, but I have owned their product and done just that with it. DDI and software allowed me to do the majority of: "gramma deleted the pictures" or "we dropped the computer and now it won't boot". It won't do it all, but save those expensive tools like PC-3000 for down the road after you have established yourself a bit.  

I would disagree with save it for down the road when established.

My reasoning is that if you get a physical job, P list, G list, master code reset, password, smart table, etc. and they call any of the normal places google sends you for "clean room" data recovery (even though it's a bit of a misnomer) then they will get quotes of $1700 for one drive to around $3k for one drive depending on how much data (TB or GB) or how much damage is done to it. Maybe it's a simple rewrite of the FW in which case they are kind and make it $1500. Either way, these are jobs you lose because you don't have the equipment, it only takes 10 jobs to pay for it.

PC3k will run you $10k $12k $15k around that area.

Working with other data recovery companies as an agent of theirs where you take in the drive and then mail it to them will only at best get you 15% of the total price , so you'd make $250 a pop? Lots of work for that, lots of shipping.

- vrocco

I agree with all the previous posts about having knowledge and experience before starting a data recovery lab. However, speaking just to the equipment purchase part of the question, if I were starting a DR business, I would buy a DeepSpar Disk Imager and a couple of the leading software recovery products. With these, you can get probably 75% of the DR cases that will come in.

I don't work for DeepSpar, but I have owned their product and done just that with it. DDI and software allowed me to do the majority of: "gramma deleted the pictures" or "we dropped the computer and now it won't boot". It won't do it all, but save those expensive tools like PC-3000 for down the road after you have established yourself a bit.

_________________
Why order a taco when you can ask it politely?

Alan B. "A man can live a good life, be honorable, give to charity, but in the end, the number of people who come to his funeral is generally dependent on the weather. " 

Can you give a very rough idea of the number of jobs (percentage) for failed disks that can be fixed by firmware fixes alone?

I don't see a large number of disks but most seem to be failed heads rather than failed firmware. ie PC3000 is normally no help.
_________________
Michael Cotgrove
www.cnwrecovery.com
cnwrecovery.blogspot.com/ 

- mscotgrove

Can you give a very rough idea of the number of jobs (percentage) for failed disks that can be fixed by firmware fixes alone?

I don't see a large number of disks but most seem to be failed heads rather than failed firmware. ie PC3000 is normally no help.

I can confirm sharing my experience. Majority of DR companies that are Atola Technology customers always point this trend out. Failed firmwares are encountered rarely, and its number is decreasing.
_________________
Vitaliy Mokosiy
Atola Technology 

There are more things that can be fixed by patching internal memory areas on the disk than meets the eye. For example, severely worn out disks with lots of bad sectors or excessive number of remapped (reallocated) sectors may not be readable via regular means. They may not be even recognizable by the system BIOS (I personally encountered a disk like that).

Now, what can be done with such a disk, and at what cost, depends mostly on a data recovery lab, qualification of their personnel, level of training, experience, and tools (software, hardware, benches etc.) they have access to.

Let's take that disk I mentioned above. It was spinning OK, but the PC would not recognize the disk on BIOS level. For all practical intents, it was dead. We needed data from that disk, so I contacted a number of data recovery labs about the issue (presenting them the actual disk on request). Here are the results. No names will be mentioned.

Recovery lab #1: "The main board is gone. Your options are getting a replacement main board from exactly the same model/revision drive, or we can send it out to clean lab, take the plates out and read the content". Their quote: $500.

Recovery lab #2: "There is a problem with head control motor. We'll need to take the plates out" blah blah. Quote: $500.

Recovery lab #3: "Here is your data. The problem? High wear level and excessive number of bad sectors caused corruption reallocation area. We had to manually rebuild that area, after which we were able to read most of the data (the rest is unreadable as it's located in the bad areas)". Total bill: $150.

See what I mean?
_________________
Digital Evidence Extraction Software
belkasoft.com 

Great Stuff from everyone, much appritiated, so i get it that most of the people don't agree on the list i've posted earlier. Can anyone suggest a complete set of tools that would favour a medium size data recovery lab?