Laptop HD repair/recovery question

[Brian Chabot]

Ed lawson wrote:

> Any suggestions of NH repair shops to check system/HD, repair and
> determine if recovery of bad drive feasible at reasonable price and/or
> best nearby recovery shop?

There have been some great recommendations so far.  Go for those if you can.

If you can't...

I often get customers who are so po they can't pay attention.  One had a 
hard drive failure and it was relatively minor by comparison to the 
stories others have told.  The partition in question usually wouldn't 
mount no matter how I tried (Win, Linux, various recovery CD's, 
different machines, etc.).  Sometimes though it would mount.  Once.  I 
could get one file or so and then ...nothing.  The customer was clear 
that I was his last resort, as he couldn't afford any of the outside 
services I recommended to him.  If I couldn't recover his data (6+ years 
of work, some 15 years of archived emails...), that was it and he'd have 
to start over.  He was quite devastated at the prospect...

As a last resort I tried the old wives' tale of freezing the drive.  I 
stuck it in the freezer in my shop for an hour.  Then I took it out, 
immediately wrapped it in a towel so it would stay cool and not form 
condensation.  I rapidly plugged it into a physical drive copy machine 
and started a raw partition copy to a known-good, blank HDD of slightly 
more size.

Miraculously it worked.  I burned the data to a DVD and off he went. (In 
the mean time, I sold him a new HDD and installed it for him.)

No, I normally wouldn't try something that questionable with most 
customers.  This was an old friend and I know the work he had saved.  I 
also made sure he knew that this might not work at all.  He was OK with 
that.  Like I said... his last resort.

Just something else to think about.


Brian

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