Sometimes, when you?re the technology go to person in your family, it can be a real pain. For some reason, the impression is usually that no matter what the damage, it's fixable. My family, in particular, has brought me everything from destroyed laptops, cellphones, and audio equipment to non-functional hard drives. They always seem surprised when I tell them that their information is not recoverable off of a hard drive or thumb drive without sending it to a specialized company. Usually, for the average consumer, the cost is prohibitive so using a data recovery company is not really possible. Even for some businesses, it can be an issue to dedicate the amount of funds necessary to get data off of a crashed drive.