Re: Computer Crash

If it's actually the hard drive, someone will most likely need to open it up & replace heads or firmware to get it working again. This isn't cheap, and if the heads actually touched the platter surface, your data (at least where the collision occurred) is most likely gone.

There is a place in Wisconsin (www.gillware.com) which claims they'll recover your data for about $400 (or don't charge you if they can't).

This is quite a bit lower than the prices I used to hear (>$1K), but I have no experience with that company so can't vouch as to their effectiveness or abilities.

There are many software solutions (try "data recovery software" on your favorite search engine), but they won't work if the drive is physically defective. (If they do, it means they caught the drive on a 'good day', before it actually died).

If you're trying a software solution, you'll want to have the bad unit as your secondary drive, not the primary. You may need to install it into another machine.

Now, if it's *not* the hard drive, but perhaps the system has just crashed & won't boot up (say, no video, no post, whatever), you could always try putting the drive in another system as described above, and just seeing if everything's still on it. You'll probably want the same operating system on the other system (FAT-based systems such as Win98 can't read NTFS-based systems such as W2K or XP).

Once the system recognizes the new drive you should at least be able to access the contents, & hopefully pull any data you need off of it.

Good luck!

peterpuck9 wrote: 
Does anyone have any suggestions on any products to use to recover
data? I always get good suggestions in this group. Thanks.

.

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