Computer help needed!!!

[perc-o-prince]

Please, no lectures on backing up info or any of that. I'm beating myself up pretty badly on that subject!

It appears the hard drive on our laptop has died. The OS won't come up. I pulled the HD out of the laptop and put in a USB housing. My desktop recognizes the USB hard drive, but keeps asking me to put a disk into it.

I know Seagate will do in-lab recovery off of drives, but its like $600. Does anyone know a person or place that's more reasonable? If nothing else, the last phone message Richs mom left for him before she passed was on that drive.

Ideas??

Thanks,
Chuck

 

[DADoES]

 
Some USB housing/adapters to mount hard drives aren't compatible with all drives.  I bought one recently with ports for SATA and IDE, it won't work with Western Digital drives (or maybe Seagate, whichever).

Take it to a trusted local computer service (not a big-box outfit), maybe they can recover the data.  Otherwise, foren$ic recovery may be the only choice.

 

[arbilab]

$600 is cheap for lab recovery. $900 is typical.

Odds are that most of the drive is still readable. Windows turns off error correction for the first few boot files. Whether accidentally or uncharacteristically customer-friendly, this unmistakably notifies that the drive has a problem while much of it is still recoverable.

Firstoff, that drive is toast. You might be able to reinstall Windoze on it but by this time next week you'd be right back where you are now AND virtually NOTHING will be recoverable once it's written over.

So, start with a new drive and a new Windoze install. You won't be able to recover installed programs, you have to reinstall those no matter what. But once you have a working boot drive, install the old one as a secondary and see how much file content is readable/copyable.

If you don't know how to do that last paragraph, have it done by local/not chain store. And don't run the failed drive, the more it spins the more the internals become contaminated by dust as it disintegrates.

 

[perc-o-prince]

Seagate = $600. BestBuy = $500. Wonder what everyone else charges!

I stopped at BB today on the way home to see what may be there for open box. Ran into a young geek who, after quizzing me on what I was looking for, what happened, etc, said I should try Recouva by Piriform. Apparently he used it a few weeks ago on his GFs friend's dead drive and got gobs of files off of it. All I need to do is download it to my desktop 'puter, unplug my DC Rom and plug the bad drive into the power and SATA cables that were in the CD drive, then run it. Well see!!! A glimmer of hope remains.

Thing is, if one of these places had said $100, $150, $200... I'd have handed over the drive and the cash. I cant help think that they're taking advantage of those of us who are careless (but won't be again!).

Chuck

 

[arbilab]

I'd guess they are gouging. That's not 'forensic' recovery, it's just recovering from "it quit booting" pre-failure. I had one of those in the lab at Dell. NT Reader. All you had to do was boot it from a floppy (remember those?). Works fine for 'gobs of files', though some will be damaged beyond casual recovery.

 

[perc-o-prince]

Haven't tried the recovery yet, but I'm looking at the replacement. Don't need anything fancy.

The old one had an AMD dual core processor and it was fine for us. I'm seriously considering a couple of options, all Toshiba, but wonder about the processors. The first one (C55-B5382) is Pentium N3540, The second (C55-C5268) is Pentium N3700, and the third (C55-C5270) is a 4th generation Core i3. Any thoughts on what I'll notice from my old one? The first is kind of a front-runner because it has both VGA and HDMI ports as well as 3 USBs.

Thanks again everyone!

Chuck

 

[perc-o-prince]

I just realized that I should have started a separate thread for this question so it might be seen. I'll take care of that now. Sorry!

Chuck