Free Lesson

[Woody]

Here's a free lesson for you:

I've been having some issues with my external hard drive.  It's a 250 gb WD.  I bought it for storing everything from family pictures to music.  I brought it in to a very good friend of mine to have him diagnose it.  In a nutshell it's dead.  Unless I shell out BIG bucks, (and even then there is no guarantee) I could take it to have a Data Recovery done on it.  Well I don't have that kind of money laying around.  (Ave. $10/mb-they do the whole drive only) In this case $2,500.00

I was always going to wait until I got the pictures organized to burn them on a CD or DVD for back up storage.  Now I wished I hadn't waited.    8 years of family photos of my 2 kids growing up,  Christmases, birthdays, & everyday photos are now history. 

The point of this post isn't sympathy.  It's to remind you to NOT put off backing up your photos and other important/sentimental documents on to either a cd/dvd or another (seperate) hard drive.  I'd hate to see anyone loose all that stuff like I did.  Dont' put it off, do it asap! 

[sochr000]

depending on what went wrong with the Hard Drive (to be referred to as HDD from here on out) there may yet be cheap (less than $2500) solutions.  If it just doesn't spin, then you can possibly replace the circuit board on the HDD, or the motor, as this link http://ezinearticles.com/?One-Method-of-Data-Recovery-from-a-Dead-Hard-Drive&id=84559 tells about.  Unless you are pretty dang techno-savvy though I wouldn't recommend doing this procedure yourself.

--Disclaimer--
I have no idea what is wrong with your HDD, if you try what I've linked, and it doesn't work, whoops. Insert more anti-liability junk here... etc, etc.

Most of all, good luck, and sorry to hear it.

[Randy Kaar]

i do have a small 10G WD drive if you want it, i have never
tried to replace just the motor. worth a try i guess

randy

[Woody]

Thanks for the advice and offer.  I was told it is likely the arm? that isn't working right.  It's making a heck of a bad sound.  I'm holding on to it hoping that someday down the road someone will come up with a way to fix it.  Kind of like putting Walt Disney on ice til a later date!   

[Benny]

I have to pick up my desktops from my computor guy this week, if I remeber I will ask him if he might be able to recover it for you.

He has my WD EHD over there right now as well to down load my data for me beore he wipes them.

Benny