November 20, 2003
Uh oh...

Double-checked to make sure Messy Tower is still nonfunctional -- yep, it doesn't turn on at all, but it does smoke within one minute of being turned on... That was pretty much as I expected, so I pulled the hard drive out to install in Moggz Tower.

So, it seems we have a slight problem. Nothing I try will get the hard drive to spin up or be detected at all. It's getting power, it becomes warm, but that's it. Guess I'll have to have my brother check it on his system... As annoyed as I can get at my mother at times, I hope for her sake that the drive isn't kaputz, because she has about a *decade* of intense genealogy research and email stored on it. *shudder*

Posted by moggy at November 20, 2003 01:47 PM | TrackBack
Comments

If 'worst comes to worst' there are hard drive recovery companies around. It would be a few hundred bucks, but it's 99% certain they could get the data out and onto another drive. I've got disk forensic software, but it only works if the drive is spinning.

Posted by: Matt on November 20, 2003 05:07 PM

Hmmm... well maybe I can help since I got that new IT job ;o)

Actually, I think Matt is right and I know for certain there is a recovery place in Mill Valley that can get the info off for fairly cheap.

Posted by: Kyle on November 20, 2003 06:35 PM

Yes, I think I am going to have to take it to a recovery place -- though I hadn't thought of it until Matt pointed it out. I'm hoping it's less than a few hundred dollars, given that's more than we have by a long shot.

Heh -- Kyle, wasn't the entire reason you found out about that recovery place in Mill Valley because the two of us decided to work together one dull evening during vacation? *grin*

Posted by: Moggy on November 20, 2003 07:51 PM

For those unaware of the background on that earlier comment of mine...

Kyle brought his Toshiba laptop over one Fall/Winter evening back in 2000, so we could install Win2k on it. Unfortuantely, there was a major install glitch that actually set a password on the default (only) account! On top of it, we had the system convert the drive to NTFS, so there was no way that we knew of to access the files without getting Win2k running... :-p In the end, Kyle had to take the system to a drive recovery place so he could bring it back to functionality. Needless to say, we haven't tried an OS upgrade on any system of his since then!

Posted by: Moggy on November 20, 2003 09:21 PM