Fragile Records

[Rex_Tremende]

I am so depressed. I've been involved in information systems for twenty years. I should know better.

Last Sunday morning, the hard drive on my personal laptop kicked the mortal coil. I have been using a borrowed laptop to get my email, participate in this forum, and stay connected to my friends though my current favorite personals web site. This morning I took my laptop to The Nerd Patrol, who did a quick evaluation and gave a grim prognosis. They returned everything to me and charged me nothing for their trouble.

Photos, correspondence, records, music, addresses... Gone.

Gone, gone, gone.

Very little of it is backed up, but it's not like I wasn't aware of the risk.

The Nerd Patrol plugged my hard drive into one of their machines, which was able to detect that it was a hard drive, but could not get it to respond. We think the controller that moves the reader is shot, but I was told that this is very difficult and expensive to get around.

Of course, I would like another opinion, but I have no idea whom to turn to.

I'm hoping someone here has some suggestions.



Regards,
Rex in Desperation.

[MacTavishOfJapan]

I feel your pain Rex, last year my laptop died and took lots of things with it. I hope you find a solution.

[neo71665]

last year my laptop died, I won it in a raffle but it died 2 days after the one year warenty was out. Thats the second and last dell I'll ever own and if it wasn't free i woulda never owned that intell POS.

[KiltedKnight]

Being the paranoid person that I am I purchased an external hard drive that simply plugs into my PC and I back up everything of any value on it and disconnect it when not in use either completely if I am off on vacation and it goes into the safe or simply by switching it off. I can also access it on my laptop if I need to. The small price you pay for the hardware is nothing compared to the loss of all the pics and information that it takes years to collect that can never be replaced.

Chris.

[sorcererdale]

There are some companies out there, search google, that repair or can get stuff off broken hard drives, but it is expensive. Also sear about freezing the hard drive, but DON'T do it until you read up on it, as it may not work.

Good luck. We thought we lost our hard drive too, and I am not backing up all that I should. At least I want to get my pictures on back up. We have a back up tape, yes, tape, but that is now getting full each time and we should look at doing it on cd or something.

Any suggestions out there for a good back up way.

DALE.

[Mr. Kilt]

I can't offer any solutions or ideas, Rex, but I know how you must feel!
I spent 11 years supervising an off-site storage vault for computer back-up tapes. You'd think I would know enough to back up all my files. Nope! However, perhaps tomorrow I'll back the 'puter up. I have alot of stuff done, but not everything.

[sjrapid]

Rex,

Sorry to hear this happened to you! I know how devastating data loss can feel.

This same thing recently happened to my wife's desktop machine - a 250GB IDE drive on a 2-year-old machine just decided one day that it wanted to be a rock rather than a hard drive, and refused to spin up.

As in your case, the PC could detect it was there, but no data forthcoming. Also, the drive motor made some odd sighing noises, and the case got hot enough to emit that familiar 'burnt electronics' odour that IT people dread.

And, of course, despite the fact that my wife had been provided with a CD/DVD-writer, a spindle of of blank DVD-RWs and a handy desktop icon to run a 'backup' job which just cut the entire hard disk to DVD, the last backup of anything was months old.

I too am in the IT trade, and after the 'you're the IT expert, why didn't you back it up for me..?' discussion, I shipped the drive off to the London office of one of the specialist recovery companies (this one, if you're curious). Three days later got a pair of DVDs through the mail with every last file on them.

Yes, they're expensive - this cost me £400, (and the price of a new drive, and my time to re-install the OS to get the machine back to working condition). But to my wife, £400 was a very cheap deal indeed to get back her contacts, photos, old e-mails, and not least her 'has-to-be-submitted-in-less-than-one-month' masters degree thesis, itself the work of 2½ years.

On the basis of my experience, I'd recommend not trying anthing yourself, and trying one of the specialist data recovery companies. The better ones offer no-fix-no-fee type arrangements. I'd certainly be happy to recommend the one I used.

Best regards