hard drive recovery?

[amethystmoon.livejournal.com]

Does anyone know of a place in the area that can do hard drive recovery, other than Microcenter or Best Buy (which I'm already looking into)? I've been doing some looking online, but my hard drive is clicking, and a lot of places seem to say they won't deal with that.

Alternatively, does anyone in the area have an Archos Gmini MP3 player, and could lend me the charger for a bit? I used mine as my backup hard drive, but I lost the charger and the battery is presently dead.

Edit: Thank you all for advice and suggestions. I've found a charger for the Archos, and I'm going to try a couple more at-home efforts with the hard drive, involving different boards, the assistance of a kind LJ neighbor, and possibly this fun-sounding freezing option, and chalk it up to a loss if they don't work. Who knew clean rooms were so expensive? ;)

Comments

[rethcir.livejournal.com]

If I were you I'd keep it the F away from best buy. Any serious computer technician/IT Guy will tell you Geek Squad is an absolute sham. (google "geek squad sucks" for some horror stories on this). In short, they are not a service organization, but a sales organization, so expect to be upsold and not given great service.

ANYWAY. Does the drive still reliably boot up? If so, before it dies you might be able to image the disk to a new hard drive using a tool such as Norton Ghost or G4L (http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l - this is freeware). This might or might not be beyond your comfort level, but just floating the option.

[amethystmoon.livejournal.com]

Ha! good to know. Unfortunately, it doesn't boot, and doesn't have a functional computer to be in anymore (various other hardware bits in the laptop also died. It was getting old). No disk imaging for me...

[pierceheart.livejournal.com]

Why not?

there are various add on devices that can be used to see a laptop hard drive as an external usb drive, and then, if you have another external drive, you can use acronis' imaging program to copy it ... if it will run with power applied to it ...

unfortunately...

[amethystmoon.livejournal.com]

Its not booting is unrelated to the otherwise mostly dead laptop. I've tried a few configurations of external case plugged into another computer, in all instances the clicking persists and the computer it's plugged into won't recognize the drive. And it sounds, from the websites I've been checking out, like I've probably damaged it further by continuing to try.

Re: unfortunately...

[srakkt.livejournal.com]

I've got a USB gizmo you're welcome to borrow, and if you have another USB HD, we can simply copy the data over.

[mattdm.livejournal.com]

If it won't boot, I'd say you're extremely likely to go over your couple-of-hundred limit in any attempt to recover data. So I'd suggest skipping worrying further about that and concentrate on either getting data from the backup or recreating the data.

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah. This problem is beyond anyone at Best Buy or the equivalent. It's possible that someone at MicroSystems might know where to send it.