I was stupid and hadnt backed up much of my information. Id like to be able to get it back. I have 3+ years of pictures and all of my school papers. Does anyone know a good and fairly cheap place that can get the information or know any tricks?

 

does it not even run anymore?

 

my computer froze... i turned it off and back in. It read Primary hard drive not found, fixed optical drive not found.

I tried a bunch of troubleshooting and bought a new harddrive. This fixed the problem.

Also, its a laptop.

 

That sucks! Usally there are warning signs before a drive fails. If you didnt get any error messages then it may not be the drive. can you try the drive in another laptop?

 

i was going to say, if you were just getting read failures, i have some really good software. if the drive doesn't even spin anymore then you need to send it to a data recovery warehouse and that's major $$$

 

Can you get into the System Restore? I was able to bring a computer back from the dead that way. I guess I should first ask if you can get Windows back up. If you can, then you can get into System Restore.

Go to the lower left and right click on START. Then go to SEARCH, under the "look In" box, make sure your C drive is selected then type in System Restore. There are steps that will walk you though the system restore.

Email Gregg Ginsburg, he's a computer guru. Hopefully he can talk you through it.

Warren

 

The computer will not read the drive at all, it wouldnt go in to any screens at all.

The weird part is that there were no warning signs. I had been getting a lot of popups and annoying programs, but nothing that would make me think my hard drive was done for.

Id check it on another laptop... but i dont think any of my freinds trust me that much.

 

How often (if ever) had you run programs such as Ad-Aware or Spybot? How well had you kept up your antivirus definitions and run scans often? Your mentioning of the pop-ups makes me think you had one or more of these issues working towards the demise of your HD.

None of my questions answer how you'll get back what you hadn't backed up... However, you have a new drive now, and therefore another "go" at it. Backup often...and protect often. Sorry about your woes . I'd hate to lose all my pics . A quick CD burn of your [next] My Documents (which includes My Photos) -- if this is where you tended to keep your files in the past -- would be a good practice in the future. Again, hate that it happened. But a HD's death is [ultimately] as inevitable as breathing.

 

Where do you work (not that I need to know that specifically...)? But does your workplace have a PC support group? I'm often amazed just how much "non-business" tech support gets offered in our PC support area. Not that its OVER prevalent...but it happens. And the techs often do side-projects on their own time (read...for $$$). Could be that you might have an opportunity to retrieve your files this way...if a tech is looking for a challenge, and a little extra coin.

 

If the drive doesn't even spin up, it doesn't matter how much spyware and crap you had on there, that's a mechanical problem.