*cries*

[elwen]

My 120GB external harddrive is dead. I don't think it had anything extremely important on it, and now that I can remote desktop into my computer at school, I can access most of the grad school and other info that I had copied to bring home. But it had all of my OSTs and a good portion of my unwatched anime and all my music videos and some of my pictures and various other things I kind of want back.

It was working fine last night, but this evening I noticed that it wasn't on anymore. My power adapter has a green LED, which dimmed and flickered when I turned it on, which it didn't do before. There was no other response from the drive, so I thought it was a power supply issue like I had with my computer in the past. I opened the case up and we put the drive into my sister's computer, and ended up frying one of the chips on the logic board, apparently. [And when we put her computer back together afterwards, it would no longer boot up until I unplugged the floppy drive. In general I'm not as cynical as most people are about computers being incomprehensible and subject to Murphy's Law, but sometimes...]

I've been Googling around, and it seems like it might be possible to get the thing working again by just replacing the logic board, but there are lots of scary comments like it won't work unless it's from the same batch or something. My poor data. ;_;

Any advice from you computer savvy people on the friends list? The drive's a Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9 120GB ATA/133, if that helps.

Comments

[bobthemole.livejournal.com]

I can hug you. eep :(

When I was 15, our hard disk broke and I lost all the poetry I'd written uptil then. Including one I'd won a prize for. That taught me to keep backups.

[smamole.livejournal.com]

For hard drive data retrieval, I'd normally suggest sending it to a professional, but that can get kind of pricey so it really depends on how important the data you want to retrieve is to you. There are many different groups that'll do it. I've heard that both of these groups (http://www.msurgeon.com/index.html or http://www.drivesavers.com/index.html) do well, but, as I said, that's only if you are willing to spend the money. (or there could be others I haven't heard of for cheaper too...)

Otherwise, I haven't really read it, but the title ("200 ways to revive a hard drive") looks amusing - http://www.hddrecovery.com.au/downloads/200ways.pdf

[ctrl-a.livejournal.com]

I can sympathize. The last time I lost all my data it was because of the Chernobyl virus, which wiped out all of my story ideas and half-written chapters and made me really sad. That taught me to use virus scanners and religiously keep online backups of my writing. I probably should have been more paranoid about backing up other things, too.

[ctrl-a.livejournal.com]

The estimate I got from a data recovery service for my Chernobyl-wiped hard drive was around $1000, so I'm kind of reluctant to turn to those, especially since most of them won't quote you a price unless you mail them your hard drive first. The main problem is that they primarily cater to companies and large organizations, whose data are much more critical and who are thus willing to pay the exorbitant prices.

I did find one company that says it will do things short of opening up the thing in a clean room for $99. (The clean room puts it up to $400 or so.) So I'm keeping that under consideration, especially since a replacement harddrive from which to steal the logic board looks like it'll be about $50 on eBay.

[smamole.livejournal.com]

yeah, as I said, price is an annoying issue with this stuff. I'd normally ask the local "geeks in a van" type group, but I don't know what's in your area. Though the 1st one of the companies I mentioned did say they do "Special discounts for the educational market" here http://www.msurgeon.com/submit_case/index.html ...although knowing most cases, that probably won't include the average student... ...but it sounds nice at least

[blackrock.livejournal.com]

Oh man, I guess this is a reminder that I should probably back up my external HD. -.-;;;

I'm practically computer-illiterate, but good luck trying to revive your HD!