My main hard drive of my brand-new PC died last night, with almost every piece of data I own on it. I was in the middle of a PC reorganization at home, and about to purchase a bunch of blank DVDs when they go on sale at the end of this week at CostCo, but, as Murphy would have it, my drive died first!

Anyway, I won't be online too much - with email down, you'll be limited to PM me or use my S2KI email, both of which I can sometimes check from work, or my wife's PC.

Anyone know of a good hard drive recovery place?

JonasM

 

Jonas,

For what it's worth, I would recommend an external hard drive for backups. USB 2.0. It is much faster then burning a bunch of CD's.

 

I just sent you an email. I may be able to help depending on what the problem is.

 

Thanks for the replies. I'm certain that it's hardware, having heard the 'Click of Doom' before (I'm no novice when it comes to hardware). I've reconstructed partition tables with hex editors, resurrected I don't know how many drives for friends, recovering as much as possible before it completely died. This one is D-E-D dead. The BIOS won't even recognize that it's there (I tried it in another PC, just to be sure).

Normally, I have all my important data on at least 2 drives, usually on separate PCs (I've made it clear to Virginija which PC to grab if the house is on fire!) Murphy was waiting for the one window of opportunity that presented itself!

I've gotten quotes from 3 different places - looks like about $1K to recover whatever is still there. I'm thinking it might be worth it.

Of all people, I should have known better - but with the drive beuing about 6 months old, I was too trusting.

As for backups, I really only use them for true archives - stuff I don't need day to day, but want to have handy. I've found DVDs to be pretty good size (for now).

Oh, well, live and learn......

JonasM