RIP Laptop
My laptop is completely dead. We (as in my dad the tech geek) are unable to make contact with anything in my hard-drive, as it is being recognized as an unformatted drive.
I have contacted my tech support through work (an outside firm). They will take a look at it tomorrow, but have warned this will cost me and there are no guarantees. They may be shipping it out for data retrieval.
Posting online may not occur for a little bit, as I’m pretty freaked out and upset. Beyond all my pictures of Little Dude, I have mailing lists, PDA back-ups, contacts and email addresses, my resume and educational history – the list goes on.
Give me some time. I know there are worse things in life – this isn’t like a human life, but I’m just overwhelmed with the amount of work and time involved to possibly recreate these items if necessary, not to mention the costs associated with this.
I’ve backed up some pictures on my work computer, but not all. Some are uploaded to Snapfish, but I haven’t had a chance to run an upload lately. Many of my videos are on Google’s video service or YouTube, but again, not all.
My pictures from friends and family – gone. My emails from friends and family – gone. I’ve been slowly moving things to my gmail account, but I’m not completely there yet. I have a home email and those items were on my laptop in Microsoft Outlook.
Per the tech support firm we work with, my HP Pavilion can be described as a piece of cr@p. Not what I wanted to hear right now.
Lesson for all: Go forth and back-up everything!
External Hardrives… Worth every penny!
Love Flickr!
Not gone, my dear. Just not visible. Computer Geeks can do miracles. Chris used to do data retrieval for a firm that dealt with hard drives that had been totally erased. Data is rarely ever totally gone. Just hiding in a place you wouldn’t think to look for it. I have huge hopes that you will be reunited with your data once again.
I paid the 25 bucks to get a pro account at Flickr, and now I just upload everything there. I also back up to an FTP site that is hosted in Arizona.
Chris uses a thumb drive for everything. He keeps two on his keychain.
My own laptop is months away from death, but we can’t expect immortality on something we paid 25 bucks for. Chris purchased a broken one and fixed it. And now it’s wonderful, except I have to turn it upside down a few times a day and hit it really hard to get it to wake up. But that’s the price I’m willing to pay.
Hugs, hunny. Hugs.
OMG. OMG!!!! I’m so sorry. I can’t put into words how freaked I am for you. I have sooo much on my HP laptop…and have had so much trouble. Let’s recount: new hard drive, install Vista, reinstall Vista…not happy. I will stay with laptops because I love the versatility, but I’ll go iMac next. But I’m going to make a concerted effort to upload my pics to Shutterfly now. And I love my EHD, it’s saved me. Oh hon, I hope they can work a miracle for you!
Mamacheryl is right gone is not necessarily gone.
In the last post the way you described it was file corruption, now it sounds more like a physical disk error.
This is worse, but far from unrecoverable.
Get a copy of SpinRite 6 (www.grc.com). It costs $90 but it is money well spent. In fact if you are not sure whether it is worth the money, get a bootleg copy and if it works it is worth tossing the guy $90. In my opinion there is nothing better than SpinRite.
I would be very sceptical of a general tech support firm attempting this type of work. They are rarely able to do more than the above but yet charge an arm and a leg for the privilege.
Worst case scenario you go to a company like drive savers and they charge stupid amounts of money to get it back.
UGH, UGH, UGH!!!! How completely awful. Hopefully everything lost will be found. (((hugs))) So sorry.
Ah man!! This all stinks!! I back-up pictures to disc and have 3 copies of them. Ones here, ones at Gramma’s and ones in Texas. Hopefully my pics are somewhat safe that way. As for everything else…. well I guess we know what I’m most worried about. Sorry!! Hope you can retrieve it!!
Thanks everyone, for all the thoughts and such.
I truly feel like an idiot. I’ve been trying to slowly upload/back things up as I’ve had a moment, but I haven’t worked at it as quickly as I should have.
Mr Geek – I’m forwarding your link to the techy-father-person, for his thoughts. I’m using the place through work, as I think they may waive their fees if they have to send it out. They’ve already given me an idea of costs if that occurs ($300), which is apparently reasonable in these parts, from what I’m hearing.
Not that we have $300 to spend, but I’m in a corner.
Thanks everyone! I’ll try to post an update when I have one. I’m stuck hijacking the Hubby’s computer or posting from work during a break, but please understand if I don’t do a lot of blog hopping or updating for a little bit. Thanks!
Well that just sucks, doesn’t it. We put way too much faith in these boxes. And when they fail us, we are devastated. I’m sorry
Sending (((hugs)))). I agree, don’t give up hope!!!
Don’t give up the hope that your data will be retrieved. I am so sorry for the upset that this has caused you.
Oh, that sucks. Knowing that I’ll have to turn in this laptop eventually (Halloween-ish?) I’m trying to get everything moved to someplace online for storage. It’s maddening.
{{hugs}}