Harddive died · 9:18pm February 16th
Last year when I had my little vacation I noticed my laptop having signs of its approaching death, so I ordered a cheap external hard drive. It was a panic purchase, I am very uneducated on computers aside from their general use, and copied all my data. I since used it as the main storage space to keep microsoft's prying eyes out of my affairs (its the spirit of the thing rather than having anything scandalous, I'm actually quite boring). But so goes the saying "putting all your eggs in one basket."
Last week it stopped working. In that it stopped communicating with my PC. it still gets power, still spins up, blinks like its looking for a connection but the computer can't find it. After having microcenter confirm they don't do soldering, the conclusion is that there's a connection that needs to be repaired. But they don't do that kind of work. Scouting around for a place that would do that (since Microcenter only know a forensics data recovery place with a $1,350 price tag)
That said, my two mistakes were thus:
1. Putting all my data onto 1 external hard drive
2. Purchasing and trusting a no-name, cheap chinese made external hard drive.
Argh, that really sucks :(
You might try getting it to a smaller PC-Repairshop if there's one near you and see if they can do repair/data recovery less expensively.
Otherwise... with some luck the external HD is actually an external HD case (for the USB connection) holding a cheap "normal" HD drive (so removing the HD from the case and connecting it directly might work).
Final option would be use to some kind of "undelete" tool on your laptop (assuming you had deleted the files from the laptop's HD after copying it over), allowing you to (maybe) recover some older versions of the files.
5768402
I'm presently looking at a small local shop. I'm hearing good things, but I'll definitely bring up what you said to them.
I don`t know anything about computers either, but I hope things work out well for you.
Good luck.
5768447
I didn't lose my notes for the stories I'm doing here, or my progress since that's all on googledocs, but a year's worth of progress on my other original works are all locked in that hard drive.
Sorry about that. I picked up Lord Barleycorn about 3 weeks ago and enjoyed it immensely. I hope things work out for you.
5770611
Its been setback after setback but i got it to a repair place. Still don’t have assurances that it will be repaired. =\
Yeah, technology just plain sucks sometimes.