Hard drive crash

sorry this is off topic but my main computer crashed 2 days ago (250gb worth of data!) and since Synthzone (Nigel) had a crash on his server recently, i was wondering if there are any good companies out there that can recover the disk at a reasonable rate ?

Thanks for the input.
Claude

What crashed exactly???
Did your harddrive(s) crash? (250gb is more as one probably)
Did your O/S crash (windows)
Or did your computer crash (mainboard or whatever?)

Harddrives rarely crash without earlier symptoms (win2k or xp will warn upfront)



[This message has been edited by freddynl (edited 09-28-2004).]

I was unaware that someone even made a 250GB drive. Wow!

With this much data, are you telling us that you did not have a back-up?

Gary

the irony of the whole thing is that i bought another drive one day before the crash and was about to install it to make a backup. Obviously, didn't get to that fast enough.

The hard drive actually crashed. The computer was on whole day without doing any activities and when i got back home, it was turned off. When i turned it back on, video card was damaged as well as my hard drive. I plugged in the drive into another power supply using a different computer, the drive doesn't seem to spin anymore at bootup.

Since it doesn't seem to get power, it won't be recognized in the bios and can't be detected. I'm suspecting my power supply from the case went bad and fried some components. I'm thinking about replacing the circuit board on the drive as a last hope.

Claude

If you have (did have unfortunately) mission critical stuff on your computer it is always advised to have a secondary Hard Drive installed so you can back up your data to the spare Drive.

Lesson learned I hope Claude!

Best regards,
Mike

PS: Are you absolutely sure the Hard Drive won't power up? You may want to try other ways to get it to power up. Be creative!

You have nothing to lose anyway, right? So with a little ingenuity you may be able to salvage your Hard Drive.



[This message has been edited by keybplayer (edited 09-29-2004).]

There are companies that recover data from drives, nothing is garanteed, but it worked once for me.
A customer in Cali fried a drive, i brought it to them and they where able to retrieve almost all data for me.

Hi Mike,

You bet i learnt my lesson. First thing i'm going to get is a UPS and backup my stuffs on dvd from now on.

I've attempted to replace the circuit board on one of the drive last night, the good new is the drive did power up and was recognized in the bios but could not be detected as a drive letter since the serial number information was not read properly. I guess i'm going to have to call the experts on this one. just FYI.

Claude

I know this sounds nuts, and I thought so before I tried it, but put the HDD in a plastic bag and place it in the freezer overnite. I have tried this with 5 drives, and was able to retrive data off of 3 of them. I build computers out of donated parts for people who can not afford them, and a tech friend told me this. I called him nuts, untill I tried it. what have you got to lose?