02 March 2014

dammit

My external hard drive, where all of my pictures were stored, has crashed. It just sits there and clicks.

I can't figure out how it happened, it was working just fine and then all of a sudden...

$150 just to have it looked at, general ballpark estimate between $500 and $600 to recover the data.

All my pictures of Laura. That's the thing that bothers me the most, and that's the reason I'll pay the bill.

5 comments:

RabidAlien said...

Dude, sounds like a "head-knocker". The only way to recover data from something like that is to carefully pull the HD platters out and basically rebuild the drive. That aint' cheap, but its the ONLY way to retrieve data from a drive that's physically failed. On a brighter note, external drives are dirt cheap these days....pick up two or three for backup of important files.

MSgt B said...

Damn.
Hope you get all that back.

Larry said...

Yep, that's what I'm going to have to do. It was an external, it was supposed to be the backup...but it wasn't backed up...d'oh!

I'm looking at getting some solid state for the next one, and maybe two or three regular hard drives that I can ghost so I'll at least have copies of everything.

Larry said...

Thanks MSgt B, I hope I get it all back, too.

Anonymous said...

Here's something that worked for me (but I'm an elektronyker by trade and knew what I was getting into. It's not hard ...).

I went on ebay and found the drive electronics board - can't recall the company, this was in 2006). I bought it for something like $50 and replaced it. As far as I know, the drive has worked fine ever since. All I cared about was working long enough to pull the data - I've never used it since.

RabidAlien could be right - it can be an expensive procedure if the drive fails. External drives are much cheaper than lost data.

Backup, backup, backup.

Once is necessary; twice recommended for "good" stuff. Thrice for critical data (such as pictures of loved ones and financial records). Keep one of the backups in a different physical location ... one possible use for a safety deposit box.

Good luck !

Q