I'm gonna cry :(

[ET Awful]

After all the other hardware difficulties I've had, I now found out that one of my main hard drives is bad. The sad part is that this is the one that had all my good pictures of Quinn and Althea. So, the versions that are on my gallery site are all I have left now :(.

I'm going to try some data recovery tools tomorrow, but if those don't work, I'm SOL. Also in those folders were pictures of friends that I may never see again, since they live in Brazil.

:cry:

That'll teach me to back stuff up.

[neuvocat]

1. They can be recovered

but I don't know how much you're willing to spend for those photos or anything else you wanted to keep.

[LynzM]

4. Second that...

There are a ton of people who know about doing this stuff, in great detail. Unfortunately, I'm not one of them, but best of luck to you with it. It sucks to lose pictures. Definitely invest in a CD burner and a stack of blank CDs for the future. :hug:

[ET Awful]

5. I've already salvaged what I could myself, which wasn't much.

I'm going to try and get more tomorrow.

I can't afford to spend any money on it, so I may just have to kiss it all good bye :(.

[mike_c]

2. unless the drive is thoroughly scorched...

...you can probably recover a lot from it. Does it spin and transfer data, i.e. is it a bad sector or surface damage issue? If so, I'd boot from another drive and grab as much as you can while you still can. Good luck!

[Spinzonner]

3. Sometimes data can be recovered from bad drives

even with severe damage. It usually requires special hardware and handling and is typically done by recovery companies.

As you might expect, it can costs $$'s, the amount depending on the effort involved and other factors.

You should be able to find them in the yellow pages under data recovery or disk/disc recovery or using a search engine.

You will need to decide how much the data is worth to you. If it's part of a business, it's possible the cost might be a deductible expense.

[benburch]

6. Recovering a drive can cost several thousand dollars.

I seriously considered it once when my drive failed, and my tape drive ate the backup tape!!!

Now I keep TWO backups of everything.

[ET Awful]

7. I know, I've had to send drives out to be recovered before for

law firms I used to work with.

Unlike them, I don't have bottomless pockets though.

I'm going to try some data recovery tools I have at the office tomorrow and see if I can get anything back, but I'm not getting my hopes up :(.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

8. Get a copy of Knoppix.

Take that old HD and put it into one of those USB external cases. Plug it into the pooter. Put the Knoppix CD into the CDROM and reboot it. Knoppix will run from the CD. Goto the toplevel directory /mnt and open up a device called /sda1 or 2 with a file manager. See if you can get into the HD. If you can, you can copy the files off and save a grunch of money.

If you cannot do this yourself, find a Linux Users Group in your area and ask them.