my wife's 13 month old HP Pavillion laptop HD died.
it only came w/ a 1 year warranty and yes, we didn't get the extended warranty.

anyway, i know we can get a new HD. (prolly hunt thru the Hybrid computer thread for the best price)


my main concern is, my wife recently (since Christmas break) has been working on a very large business project.
she's putting together information to open a daycare center and since she had some time off she deceided to really start working on this project.
she worked on it her entire 2 weeks off and works on it every night from ~8:00 til 11:00.

she has prolly over 150 hours on this stuff since just Christmas break.
i hadn't really thought about backing it up, cus it's been such a sort span of time, and because the files are not large (90% of them are word docs).

the computer guy we took it to to verify the HD is dead told her the data is more than likely gone for good, so now she is in tears.
that and cus we stored all our digital photos on her lappy.
i may have those backed up someplace (i hope).

anyway main question:
has anyone had luck recovering data from a crashed HD?
if so, pirce range?
any recomendations on where to send it?

all the help is appreciated.
thanks guys.

 

I used this place once at my last job. They got most of the data off. They are in the Bay Area.

http://www.drivesavers.com/

I would say your best bet to get the info intact is to not try anything fancy and go and do something yourself. Unplug it and just leave the machine alone until you figure out where your sending the HD.

 

Here are some tips from their website.

http://www.drivesavers.com/recovery_tips/pc_users.html

 

any memory of how much it was?

the only estimate i got was ~$100/megabyte which seems outragous IMO.
its a 60GB HD, that'd be unheard of.

 

Most HD failures are just a mechanical failure and not a magnetic drive failure, so it could be easy to recover if that were the case. I dont know how that works though...

 

Shoot them an email for a quote.

 

From the Times article dealing with this:


http://www.time.com/time/insidebiz/p...455801,00.html

 

Oh man, sorry to hear about that, good luck on getting the data off.

For future reference, I use (and would recommend) SyncBack SE for backups. It works well for backing up to another PC on the network or external drive, but I don't think it supports backup direct to CD-ROM.

 

That quote sounds about right. These services are for business and law enforcement not so much home use, unless your home has that kind of budget. With that said I have never found anyone that had anything worth paying $900-$10,000 to recover from a broked hard disk. The good news is I bet it won't happen to you guys again.

 

What are the symptoms? Does the drive spin up at all?

At least with desktop drives (as a VERY VERY LAST resort) you can wrap the drive in baggies and put it in the freezer long enough to cool it down. Then drop it into a PC as a secondary drive and pull the data off before the moisture condenses and wrecks the drive. I've used this method once successfully.

The drive had a problem where the head was making a loud clicking sound, and the drive would spin up and down contantly. After using the freezer method I was able to pull off the data that I needed.

 

i think the drive didn't even spin up.
you couldn't get it to boot from disc or anything.
it would load a handfull (maybe 20 files tops) then hang.
i never heard the HD spool up so i'm thinking it might be the motor or possible the arm lever, but i'm not sure since it wasn't a loud drive to begin with.

 

Before you give up hope it would be good to hook the drive up to another computer. If it is parallal ata then you can get an adapter to hook it up to a desktop ATA connector, but I'm not sure what the connector on the newer SATA laptop drives is.

Sometimes you can get some things off even if the OS won't boot.

Roy