Help with hard drive

[tom4bren]

"I have never encountered a virus capable of damaging hardware."

I know (despite all the urban legends). Virus was just my first thought when the PC crashed. I pretty much ruled that out as soon as I found out that the Maxtor was Tango Uniform. Even if the internal drive is OK, it's still wierd that the PC crashed simultaneous with the Maxtor crash. Just lucky I guess.

[tom4bren]

Well, the IT guys gave up with no success. They think the read head is bad & my only option is a recovery service that can actually remove the disk & read it with another device. Any further advice?

[kodiak]

That sucks man. You can tell when a head goes by running defrag. You can see a band of blocks missing. Was he able to see the drive at all? If he wasn’t there’s a possibility that it’s a corrupted fat table. If that’s the case then a recovery service might be able to fix it with out to much trouble.

[tom4bren]

'Puter won't even recognize the drive. It's an external Maxtor but they removed it from the housing & tried to run it as an internal.

[nfpgasmask]

Yeah, that sucks man. You might have to send it in to a place like OnTrack (http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/). It all depends on how much this data is really worth to you now. I am pretty sure a data recovery house will be pricey.

Bart

[tom4bren]

Wedding pix so I'll have to bite the bullet.

I was trying to call data sniffer but all the techs were busy.

[nfpgasmask]

I would call OnTrack and see what they say. Maybe they have better rates for the average person. The company I used to work for in Chicago used them all the time and we always had 100% success rates, but the cost was like $1500-$2500 depending on how much data was recovered.

Bart

[tom4bren]

OUCH!!!

It's a 330 Gig drive but I only had about 30 Gigs used. Can they be selective in the data recovered. I'm only interested in the jpg files.

[nfpgasmask]

OUCH!!!

It's a 330 Gig drive but I only had about 30 Gigs used. Can they be selective in the data recovered. I'm only interested in the jpg files.

Yeah, basically, data recovery places know that if you are calling them, they have your balls in a vice.

I'm not sure what options they have exactly, so it might be worth a phone call to see. You know, lay on the sob story about the wedding pics real thick and all.

Bart

[tom4bren]

Bart - do I hear the tone:

Yer Scrooooooooodddd - BWAAAAHAAAAHAAAA

[nfpgasmask]

Bart - do I hear the tone:

Yer Scrooooooooodddd - BWAAAAHAAAAHAAAA

Data loss, especially photographic data loss, is quite painful. I have learned my lesson, a couple times in fact, and I will do whatever I can to prevent it from happening in again in the future...

Bart

[tom4bren]

I know. I'm just rattling your cage since I'm in the middle of a very boring telecon & I'm losing my mind.

[kodiak]

That really sucks, if the bios won’t detect it when it’s hooked up directly to a motherboard then there’s something really wrong.