A Crash Question!

[Obieone]

My sister's laptop ..... well ... it died :( and I'm sorry to say all her pictures were on there and no she hadn't backed them up onto anything :( ...... in all there was probably 5 years worth of pics ..... yes .... lesson learned !
She has taken it to two different places to try and retieve what is possible to retrieve ..... with no luck ...... are they really gone forever .... where do they go .... what happens to all that info???
It was a pc not a Mac .... about 6 years old ... Windows XP .... error message was something along the lines of "unable to locate Operating system" .... I'd love to be able to help her .... PatonB ... any ideas.....

Obieone

[Thusa]

they cant recover anything off the harddrive because the OS wont boot? this doesnt exactly sound right. the info is still on the hard disk, or at least should be. im not an expert, but unless that harddrive caught on fire or something, they should still be able to get some info off of it

[dgrotz]

If the hd completely crashed it could have corrupted the entire disk, however it may just be the os and a data retrieval expert may be able to save some of the files. If she checked with the pros and they said it's gone most likely it's gone.

By the way macs hd's are just as susceptible to crashes, it happened twice to me over the past four years, I lost a lot the first time but now I make sure to backup often.

[Steven Edwards]

Obieone,

Your sister can buy a USB enclosure for the laptop hard drive and try reading the data on another computer.

Tips:

http://lifehacker.com/software/disk-recovery/recover-data-from-a-crashed-hard-drive-146386.php

[Scott Pruett]

Obieone,

Your sister can buy a USB enclosure for the laptop hard drive and try reading the data on another computer.

Tips:

http://lifehacker.com/software/disk-recovery/recover-data-from-a-crashed-hard-drive-146386.php
x2.

I've had success with MediaRecover on a large-capacity CF card that bugged out due to significant static shock: http://www.mediarecover.com/

[sjean423]

That was my suggestion too, and I'm not a computer wiz, so she should be able to handle it.

Here are some from Tiger Direct (http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/Category/category_tlc.asp?CatId=2777&name=Hard-Drive-Enclosure) .... may under $20. Most laptop hard drives are 2.5 inches.

[Patonb]

Yup......... I doubt you'd even need to use a recovery program.

http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?minorcatid=1027&subminorcatid=329

Just plug it in and like said above, copy it over.

Hmmm, is your sis asking to fix the drive? or just save the data?

[Obieone]

Thanks you guys for the suggestions .... you're great ... and we're working on it! As it turns out it was only a year or so of pics and she had her Simply Accounting stuff backed up .... thanks god (as Adi would say :D) !

I'll let you know how it turns out .....

Obieone

[sjean423]

Just thinking. If her computer died because of any virus issue, as opposed to a hardware problem, be sure that the computer reading the bad drive is up to date with virus protection.