Fragile Records

[Mr. Kilt]

I can't offer any solutions or ideas, Rex, but I know how you must feel!
I spent 11 years supervising an off-site storage vault for computer back-up tapes. You'd think I would know enough to back up all my files. Nope! However, perhaps tomorrow I'll back the 'puter up. I have alot of stuff done, but not everything.

[sjrapid]

Rex,

Sorry to hear this happened to you! I know how devastating data loss can feel.

This same thing recently happened to my wife's desktop machine - a 250GB IDE drive on a 2-year-old machine just decided one day that it wanted to be a rock rather than a hard drive, and refused to spin up.

As in your case, the PC could detect it was there, but no data forthcoming. Also, the drive motor made some odd sighing noises, and the case got hot enough to emit that familiar 'burnt electronics' odour that IT people dread.

And, of course, despite the fact that my wife had been provided with a CD/DVD-writer, a spindle of of blank DVD-RWs and a handy desktop icon to run a 'backup' job which just cut the entire hard disk to DVD, the last backup of anything was months old.

I too am in the IT trade, and after the 'you're the IT expert, why didn't you back it up for me..?' discussion, I shipped the drive off to the London office of one of the specialist recovery companies (this one, if you're curious). Three days later got a pair of DVDs through the mail with every last file on them.

Yes, they're expensive - this cost me £400, (and the price of a new drive, and my time to re-install the OS to get the machine back to working condition). But to my wife, £400 was a very cheap deal indeed to get back her contacts, photos, old e-mails, and not least her 'has-to-be-submitted-in-less-than-one-month' masters degree thesis, itself the work of 2½ years.

On the basis of my experience, I'd recommend not trying anthing yourself, and trying one of the specialist data recovery companies. The better ones offer no-fix-no-fee type arrangements. I'd certainly be happy to recommend the one I used.

Best regards