restoring a hard drive

scootergirl

Some of you fine peeps are aware that my damn hard drive crashed a few weeks back. No warning.......just crashed. Of course, I didn't have a chance to back up my files which I lost all of them. What hurts the most is the hundreds of pictures that I had of my family dating about 5 years.

I had a new hard drive installed and brought the old one home. I asked for an estimate for restoring the old one and I was told to send it into a lab would cost me about $800! Hmmmm.......I better start scrounging the couch cushions soon! LOL

I wanted to know if anyone has had to have the hd restored before and could refer me to somewhere. I am in no hurry, but definately don't want to lose what I have sitting in this piece of metal that is staring at me from my desk. Any ideas?

Lady Lee

Did anyone tell you what was wrong with the old hard drive?

Is there any possibility of adding it into your computer as a second hard drive?

scootergirl

No, they didn't tell me what was wrong. All that was told to me was that they couldn't recover anything on it. My computer sits in a small corner of my kitchen that gets very very hot and I am thinking that maybe the heat and humidity could have done it in. We are on satellite connection w/others networked to my computer, so it is always on......or should I say WAS always on. I think maybe the old girl just got tired out and died.........

RIP!

Kingpawn

I might have an old copy of a magazine then called PC Novice. Someone wrote in with that question. No guarentee the companies mentioned are still in business.

As always, you'd have to ask how much the files are worth, but who can put a dollar value on memories?

Maybe the company that made the unit has some ideas?

SYN

It all depends on what happened to your hard drive. Did the drive mechanism fail? Did a platter shatter? Did the read/write heads crash into the disk substrate? Was there filesystem corruption? Are the read/write heads no longer reading or writing? There are so many things that can go wrong with our hard drives!

ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR DATA!!!

JT

it is usually expensive to restore cause they got you in a catch 22- THEY KNOW YOU EITHER WANT OR NEED WHAT is on the drive-

as someone mentioned you may try hooking it up as a second drive - if you are lucky it may be that the BOOT SECTOR that starts up your harddrive is bad- if so if you connect it as a Slave or second drive you can at least get to your files and move them over to the new drive

wish you well I will try to look up a couple of companies our agency has used but they do get a gov discount

i will look up the name on monday for you

shoot me an OFF LINE EMAIL

Valis

scooter..wrap up the drive and send it to me. Either I can get the datae retrieved myself, or I can have it done a lot cheaper than that!

Sincerely,

District Overbeer

Francois

Scooter, Valis beat me to it. He's got the best idea of all.

And please, get your computer out of the kitchen or any other hot space. And turn it off every night. Windows "learns" as it goes; correcting various stuff along the way and such as that. It needs to reboot in order for this stuff to take effect. Um, and do you go to Microsoft on a regular basis and download updates?

AND, go to CompUSA or some other place like it and get you a Maxtor External Hard Drive of the appropriate size, one with a USB connector if your computer has USB connectors. Back up your entire internal hard drive on it once a week, or each time BEFORE you add a new program. Then, when you've done that every week, take the Maxtor external drive and put it in the closet or somewhere else safe and COOL. You can do this for between $175 - $200.

And then you'll never be in this fix again.

-francois

scootergirl

valis.........you are my knight in shining armor!

Lesson learned.........

ALWAYS (and frequently) back up your hard drive!

StinkyPantz

My husband is a computer tech so when something goes wrong he fixes it cheaply. In other words, I know nothing about computers so I have no advice. He fixes all that kind of stuff.

restoring a hard drive

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