[X4U] Hard Drive Recovery Service Needed

[Geoffrey Loeffler]

If it's making noise, do not attempt to recover it yourself at all.  
There are so many companies that do this it will drive you crazy, yes...

I also like www.drivesavers.com , get them to put it on a hard disk  
for you. I think they will let you  send one in or they will supply it.

Check some of the others, but be sure to get the terminology down,  
Zekes garage and drivetrain repair might give you a good price, but  
the lab that they do this in, if that is what is required, is what  
counts, not just the price.

  I had the work backed up and I was backing up the Mail, iTunes, all  
the Apple goodies that Apple likes to store with it's Applications. I  
prefer my applications on one partition and my work on another. That  
saved my hide as only the Apple system partition went blzzzt.

  There was a light flash,  maybe a dip in power, and the PB drive  
and the back up drive were working at the same time, right in the  
middle of a backup. My fault, no UPS, that is a must for back ups and  
I just saved you money and a whole lot of frustration if you go buy a  
300 watt UPS for your books, higher for your Desktop, it cleans the  
power up and my electronics that are hooked up on it run just fine.  
It has a beeper when the power drops slightly or rises. You would be  
surprised at the dirty power. I have never had a HD failure, this was  
my first.

I was also 4000 miles away from most of my back ups and software  
reinstalls, no one there.

I had my mission critical  work backed up, except the email,  
keychain, and address book, that is a lot to me. Huge.

So I tried it myself.

Again, if it's critical not to lose anything go with the pros.  If  
you do not mess with it, you probably will get lucky.

If it's not vital you can try some of the disk recovery software. It  
is very vital to me, but I was watching my new MacPro go out the door.

  Do not use anything that tries to rebuild the directory or fix the  
drive. Stay away from Disk Warrior and the like. You just want to  
take the data off as a copy, and leave it as it is , just in case you  
can't get the info and the pros need to get at it.

I used Data Rescue 2 , the easier of the interfaces, but took 48  
hours of straight work, night and day, for an iBook G4 1.1 Ghz to get  
50 Gigs of info of my PB G4 1.67 Ghz and on to a new drive in a  
portable enclosure.  Results good, but scattered and lots of time  
rebuilding, and some of that is by hand as it does not want to be  
brought in to the new drive. So did I say lots by hand.

The mail will go into a folder where it turns into a document that  
your word processor can open, if I could find a good one. I have MS  
08 but hate to use it. Probably will use Appleworks, or Pages, been  
looking at a few options, nothing really zings me.

Good luck

Geoff



Another product is FileSalvage basically the same theory and  
operation. I was less impressed with this and the tech support was  
not very good. These seem to be the top of the heap.

Again, if this is absolute can't lose info. Don't even mess around,  
send it to the pros.

How bad is this, my next post will tell.
Geoff




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