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Friday the 13th
Jul. 17th, 2007 09:46 pm(I didn't really realize that it was Friday the 13th at the time, but it just hit me today....)
I woke up to find my computer sitting quietly -- well actually not so quietly (more on that in a minute) -- with the simple message
"SYSTEM NOT FOUND"
on the screen. It was also making an ominous humming sound. I had a sinking feeling that the sound wasn't coming from something as simple as a bad CPU fan. Indeed, it was not.
I tried to reboot. No luck. Tried to put the Hard Drive in an enclosure and get at it on B's computer. No luck. I took it to the local computer techs at Intrex. No luck and a cost of $70 to tell me such.
So, now I have to decide if the data on the drive is worth sending it off to the big guns that rebuild the drive, get the data off and charge me lots of money. Lots and lots of money.
And I need to decide which set of folks to send it to. So far, I've been the most impressed with OnTrack Data Recovery, to a large extent because, though they do charge a diagnostic fee, they also give you a list of all of the files that they will be able to recover, give you the price it's going to cost to get them back, and then let you decide whether its worth it. Almost all of the others tell you it could be between say $500 and $2000, that it depends on either a) how hard it is or b) how much of your data they get back but c) we can't tell you how much it will cost until we've already done it.
Does anyone have any experience with any particular companies that you would recommend or anti-recommend? I'm probably going to end up sending the drive off tomorrow or Thursday. I've got to be able to get back to work in some reasonable ammount of time, and this drive has all of my work data on it. I've got some of it (names, addresses and calendar) on my palm, but all of my customer contact notes are stuck on the *&#$(&# drive. Did I have a backup? Of course not. Do I have an excuse for not having a backup? Of course not. I even had a hard drive in an enclosure sitting on my F---ing desk! Its not like it would have taken much time to backup my data, but nooooo. I had to procrastinate and think of other things to do. (/self recrimination)
So, if anyone has any thoughts, recommendations or commiseration to share, I'd appreciate it.
Jack
I woke up to find my computer sitting quietly -- well actually not so quietly (more on that in a minute) -- with the simple message
"SYSTEM NOT FOUND"
on the screen. It was also making an ominous humming sound. I had a sinking feeling that the sound wasn't coming from something as simple as a bad CPU fan. Indeed, it was not.
I tried to reboot. No luck. Tried to put the Hard Drive in an enclosure and get at it on B's computer. No luck. I took it to the local computer techs at Intrex. No luck and a cost of $70 to tell me such.
So, now I have to decide if the data on the drive is worth sending it off to the big guns that rebuild the drive, get the data off and charge me lots of money. Lots and lots of money.
And I need to decide which set of folks to send it to. So far, I've been the most impressed with OnTrack Data Recovery, to a large extent because, though they do charge a diagnostic fee, they also give you a list of all of the files that they will be able to recover, give you the price it's going to cost to get them back, and then let you decide whether its worth it. Almost all of the others tell you it could be between say $500 and $2000, that it depends on either a) how hard it is or b) how much of your data they get back but c) we can't tell you how much it will cost until we've already done it.
Does anyone have any experience with any particular companies that you would recommend or anti-recommend? I'm probably going to end up sending the drive off tomorrow or Thursday. I've got to be able to get back to work in some reasonable ammount of time, and this drive has all of my work data on it. I've got some of it (names, addresses and calendar) on my palm, but all of my customer contact notes are stuck on the *&#$(&# drive. Did I have a backup? Of course not. Do I have an excuse for not having a backup? Of course not. I even had a hard drive in an enclosure sitting on my F---ing desk! Its not like it would have taken much time to backup my data, but nooooo. I had to procrastinate and think of other things to do. (/self recrimination)
So, if anyone has any thoughts, recommendations or commiseration to share, I'd appreciate it.
Jack
