Posted: 4/19/2011 4:54:39 PM EDT
| My HP Pavillion crashed. All my phone lists, pictures, address book, etc are on the hard drive and I didn't even think about backing it up. Took the box to Best Buy, but their prices for service are outrageous. Can anybody here recommend someone I can take this thing to who can restore the hard drive or download the data on it to a thumb drive without charging me an arm and a leg? |
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since you have interweb get on ebay and look for a HDD enclosure. you will need to know what type of HDD you have, either SATA or IDE. i use one on a pretty regular basis until this week. the PS on mine took a dump on me though now that i need it. so i have to order a new one as well. with the enclosure, you hook it up to your PC via USB and it shows up as an external HDD so you should be able to recover most if not all of your data.
amazon has a couple, search for "USB to HDD cable". prices are decent. |
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Quoted:
since you have interweb get on ebay and look for a HDD enclosure. you will need to know what type of HDD you have, either SATA or IDE. i use one on a pretty regular basis until this week. the PS on mine took a dump on me though now that i need it. so i have to order a new one as well. with the enclosure, you hook it up to your PC via USB and it shows up as an external HDD so you should be able to recover most if not all of your data. amazon has a couple, search for "USB to HDD cable". prices are decent. Thanks, but I can't even get the HP to boot up, so I've got to get that problen fixed first. |
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If the HP isn't working, you may have to pull out the harddrive use the enclosure on another machine and pull the data off to a thumbdrive.
If it turns out the HP is dead and your going to need another machine, some people offer data migration services or can mount your old harddrive in the new machine. Assumption is that your current harddrive is not dead. |
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I am to far from you to help in person but, I have a few questions.
What do you mean by crashed? Are you getting blue screens, is the pc rebooting during the boot process, does the pc not power on at all???? We need a little more detail here. Do you hear the hard drive spinning? If so, are you hearing any unusual noises out of it. I have worked in IT for over 12 years and just did a data recovery off a laptop yesterday for one of my users. If the drive spins without unusual noises or the pc will not power on at all, then you can remove the hard drive and put it in a drive enclosure. Once you get it in a drive enclosure you can plug that hard drive into any pc, if you have a spare or a friend will let you use there for a bit. The drive will come up as a secondary and you can look through it and pull what you need. If the drive is making unusual noises that indicates a physical failure, those are not good. At that point you want to stop trying to recover the data since every time you use it the drive is damaging itself more and more. To get your data off at this point is going to be expensive. There is a place in Reston called Ontrack. They will diagnose the drive and let you know what they can and can't get. I have used them multiple times, the most recent was 5 years ago for a company hard drive, the evaluation was $100. If you decide to use them for the recovery they apply that evaluation price to the final bill. The cheapest I have gotten out of there was $1,000. I would go to there website or call them for a price quote as there prices might have changed. If you have any questions, feel free to IM me. |
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Ditto on what rookie said, what type of errors, noises, etc. are you getting? What operating system do you have on it (XP, 7, Vista, etc.)? I am in Berryville and can easily move files over to flash drive for you, I have enclosures for most configurations and tons of resources available. I do this stuff for folks all the time in my spare time. |
| I would definitely not get mid-evil on the HDD just yet, as it may be a recoverable error. If you have not had a physical disk failure and your intentions are to recover your data, wipe the drive and reinstall the O/S, then I have a "plug and play" enclosure that would allow you to connect the HDD to another computer as a USB mass storage device, copy the data to CDs or whatever, then you can format the drive and reinstall. I'm in Sterling, but don't have a ton of time. If you're comfortable with the task, I can loan you the enclosure, or if you want to leave the drive with me, I can burn the data to DVDs or CDs and get 'em to ya in a couple of days. |
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+1 for all of the above.
You might be able to fix the issue without having to go all out data recovery. Hard to say based off of your given symptoms. I can take a look at it if you want. I have all of the necessary enclosures/drive cables and have some spare HDDs available if you need to move things over. I'm located in Ashburn if you're interested. Shoot me an e-mail at: null [at] vt [ dot ] edu |
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Quoted:
since you have interweb get on ebay and look for a HDD enclosure. you will need to know what type of HDD you have, either SATA or IDE. i use one on a pretty regular basis until this week. the PS on mine took a dump on me though now that i need it. so i have to order a new one as well. with the enclosure, you hook it up to your PC via USB and it shows up as an external HDD so you should be able to recover most if not all of your data. amazon has a couple, search for "USB to HDD cable". prices are decent. OR.....You could just buy it while you are at Best Buy....I keep a selection of HDD enclosures in my kit for these types of emergencies.... You will need to connect to a working computer Good Luck |
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since you have interweb get on ebay and look for a HDD enclosure. you will need to know what type of HDD you have, either SATA or IDE. i use one on a pretty regular basis until this week. the PS on mine took a dump on me though now that i need it. so i have to order a new one as well. with the enclosure, you hook it up to your PC via USB and it shows up as an external HDD so you should be able to recover most if not all of your data. amazon has a couple, search for "USB to HDD cable". prices are decent. OR.....You could just buy it while you are at Best Buy....I keep a selection of HDD enclosures in my kit for these types of emergencies.... You will need to connect to a working computer Good Luck its a LOT cheaper to buy off the web. plus unless you need it right then and there you can usually have one in 3 or 4 days depending on where you order it from. of course, if you order it from china its going to take longer but there are suppliers in the US. so shipping shouldnt be an issue. |
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since you have interweb get on ebay and look for a HDD enclosure. you will need to know what type of HDD you have, either SATA or IDE. i use one on a pretty regular basis until this week. the PS on mine took a dump on me though now that i need it. so i have to order a new one as well. with the enclosure, you hook it up to your PC via USB and it shows up as an external HDD so you should be able to recover most if not all of your data. amazon has a couple, search for "USB to HDD cable". prices are decent. OR.....You could just buy it while you are at Best Buy....I keep a selection of HDD enclosures in my kit for these types of emergencies.... You will need to connect to a working computer Good Luck its a LOT cheaper to buy off the web. plus unless you need it right then and there you can usually have one in 3 or 4 days depending on where you order it from. of course, if you order it from china its going to take longer but there are suppliers in the US. so shipping shouldnt be an issue. you do pay for convenience. This is the ONLY reason I buy anything from BB.... It is after hours and I need it now....We really need a Fry's in Tidewater...Norfolk Wire near Witch Duck in VB has a lot of stuff and they take walk ins...Great people also. |
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Thanks again to all who responded. I met up with WChaing and left the box with him. He emailed me later that same evening and told me that everything was fixed, and that I could pick the box up the following afternoon. Apparently a virus had gotten in and corrupted the whole thing, and it took a bit of magic on Wayne's part to fix things.
Wayne did a fantastic job, and my computer is up again and working just fine. |