Hard drive crash

[LASJayhawk]

The HDD in my 16 month old HP laptop died without warning Wed. This would be HDD #2, the 1st one was replaced under warranty. I had made recovery discs when the 1st one was failing and used them to get the second drive back. Can't find them now, but when the 1st drive failed I got HP to send me "factory made" discs.

Guess what. The factory made discs put down a screwed up copy of windows! Windows update, security essentials, even SP1 wont run.

Got the PC running with a Win7 SP1 disc, and was able to get it registered via the phone line option, so I'm back in business, sort of.

The thumb drive with my older backups is ok, but something is afu with the thumb drive with the newer stuff. I lost my tube inventory, all my pictures and movies I had on the PC, and the graphics for the 37-116 decals I was working on.

So I can spend endless hours recreating what I can, OR, I can spend between $500 and $1900 with a data recovery service to get it off the failed drive.

I wouldn't be surprised if the sun goes out here in Vegas next!

[ipwizard]

Is your old drive completly dead or just windows wont boot? If it spins up and a computer can reconize it you might have a shot at using software to get some of your files back whole lot cheaper them sending it out for recovery. I have software we use ar work kicking around here someplace if your interested PM me.

[LASJayhawk]

Dead. Won't spin up, and I tried putting it in an external enclosure, might as well not be hooked up, it doesn't even show up as an anything

Oddest thing was it died while I was updating a spreadsheet, guess I hit File, self destruct instead of File, save.

[Geoff]

I have a ton of digital family photos on my system. To keep from having to back up to DVD's I signed up to Carbonite. It automatically backs up online whatever files you want. I think it's $60- a year for unlimited backup so only $5- a month which is well worth it. I had my drive crash and if I didn't have Carbonite I would have lost all my photos.

- Geoff

[Ron Ramirez]

I have a 1 TB external hard drive that is used only when I need to back something up. The rest of the time it sits, unplugged.

[ipwizard]

I keep my backups on a spare drive. things I really dont want to loose I keep on a thumb drive and locked in my gun safe. I have had a drive I used only for backups fail on me and that really sucks.

[TA Forbes]

Flash drives used here.