Horror of Horrors!

[Daylon]

Well.. that day has finally come that strikes fear in the heart of all photographers.

Complete catastrophic hard drive crash.

Lost everything it seems.. all my shots from the last 5 months (including 200+ from my first bridal and candid shoot - so going to have to refund most of that $$$)

Any notebook hard drive recovery specialists out there?!?

It's an 80 gig fujitsu hard drive, partitioned C/D.. I've messed around with it and can get to D - so I don't think the harddrive has gone bad.. but C is lost... maybe boot sector got corrupted or something? PLUS i can't find the F! recovery CD that came with the laptop.....

Sad part is that I *JUST* bought a 200GB external for photo backups yesterday...



D.

[Edg02]

Back up and Burn software? (not free though)

[OpticalPrime]

one of my harddrives from my work computer crashed a few years ago and we didnt have all our files backed up. We called Best Buy and they reccomended us someone to send it to. I think it was expensive, like around $500+ (dont recall exactly) but they actually got it all back for us... I dont think there is 100% guarantee, but pretty good chance you can get it back, depending on how much its worth to you

[JohnT]

Sounds like you might be able to have the data recovered, but it's going to cost quite a bit of money. I don't know anything about these folks, but if you end up having to send the drive out, this might be an option:

http://www.diskdoctors.com/

Let us know how it goes.

[AndrewCCM]

There is a company called Runtime Software that has a utility that works fairly well called "Get Data Back" Fairly inexpensive too.. Might give it a try.

[kachina]

Major bummer. All may not be lost. Call one of the following companies. No, it will not be cheap.

Give http://www.actionfront.com/ a call. They are in Addison. A friend recommended them to me so they made it into the last disaster recovery plan that I wrote.

[smdebnam]

The last time I had a hard drive fail, I was using a new 100 gig notebook hard drive that I had put into an enclosure and was using as an external. I took it into Best Buy and Fryes and both of them told me that it was dead. I did some online searches and downloaded a file recovery program for $60.00 and I was able to recover the data. The software I bought was titled "Recover My Files".

Hope you are able to retrieve your data!

[Daylon]

Alrighty - here's my plan.

Go to Fry's and get an external hard drive enclosure for my laptop HD. See if I can connect it to my desktop via USB and run Partition magic to save it.

Wish me luck

D>

[DeLeon]

Wow...bad luck! I bet you can get it back...I learned my lesson about backing up the hard way too.

[LPFyreDawg]

Originally Posted by DeLeon

Wow...bad luck! I bet you can get it back...I learned my lesson about backing up the hard way too.

Same here ;o(

[bondarnes]

If that doesn't do it I can recommend this company. http://www.drivesavers.com/ They were at the PPA convention tradeshow and you wouldn't believe some of the fire and water damaged drives they were able to save

[janetg]

and then when you have everything settled...and back in place...

get yourself a zenfolio or smugmug account - both have unlimited storage and just back up everything to their servers.

[TXhummer2]

When our first new Dell XP computer crashed its Maxtor SATA drive, no software would touch it. The company we used dismantled the drive, used temporary heads and drive mechanism in a vacuum chamber, and almost $600 later we got 95% of documents and photos back, but no Outlook pst files. If the drive makes any noises at all at boot time, the software probably won't touch it.

[rschramm]

Originally Posted by AndrewCCM

There is a company called Runtime Software that has a utility that works fairly well called "Get Data Back" Fairly inexpensive too.. Might give it a try.

I used Get data Back on a laptop hard drive that gives me the BSOD.. anyway the photos from our honeymoon, before shots of our house and our first trip to NYC were all on there.. Get Data Back recovered the complete hard drive, I was completely happy with it.. only $90. Worth every penny to hear the wife say " oh cool you got the pictures back" instead of "WHO DOESN'T BURN PICTURES TO CD TO BACK-UP?" in the three days leading up to the recovery.

best $90 ever spent.

[darktiger]

If I lived in dallas, I could help. I am pretty good getting data back with the tools from my work...