First off, Hi!

Blah! My main OS Drive Crashed ... holding mostly reinstallable programs, and A LOT of unreplaceable pictures (not screenshots, family pictures) and movies :(. Im kinda posting here cause Im sad about F@H. (Im new at it) I finished about 3-5 WUs, and none of them registered? I was going to post here and ask about it later, but now with my HD crash, I probably lost them all :(. (I could still use the advice, I think I have 2 WUs on another computer).

Aww. How much do those 'harddrive failure' recoveries cost? Is it usually in upwards of 500 bucks?

Oh - Hello everyone! Does anyone remember me?

Aye, they tend to be incredibly expensive. The price depends on the damage, though.

Hey Monk, welcome back. Too bad about your hard drive, man.

Depending on what you mean by "Harddrive Crash" it might be easy, difficult, or impossible to recover any usable data from it. Originally the term "Harddrive Crash" referred to when the disk read head physically crashed into the disk platter & gouged out a groove. If that's what happened, at least some of the data (possibly all, depending on the extent of the physical damage to the platter) is irretrievably lost. Recovering any data from a physically damaged harddrive platter involves a clean room for disassembly, and special equippment to analyze & recover data from the platter. This is phenomenally expensive, and not guaranteed to have any degree of success.

Fortunately, physical harddrive crashes are very rare now days. It's more likely the filesystem structure became corrupted somehow. This would mean the harddrive would still be usable, but any data on the drive may or may not be recoverable, depending on a number of factors, like how fragmented the filesystem was. If you hire someone else to try to recover it, it will still be very expensive (probably well over $500). But you might be able to do it yourself, if you want the data back badly enough. It is a The type of data you're trying to recover influences how difficult it would be to recover. Simple text is (relatively) easy (I've done that a time or two), images should be fairly easy if you know details on the filetype they were in & the header format for that filetype, but the larger the file, the more likely it is to be fragmented, in which case you are probably only going to be able to recover part of the file.

Anyway, my suggestion: unless you really really really want the data back, it'd be much easier to just give it up as lost, and start from scratch. Tip for the future though, partition your harddrives, so even if one partition's filesystem gets corrupted, the other partitions should be OK. Also, if you're running MS Windows, have a 3-5 GiB partition that you install Windows on, and do not put anything else on that partition. The partition Windows is installed on is the most likely to be corrupted, in my experience.

Or you could, y'know, make backups of important stuff. ;-)

Backups are always a good idea, but if you partition your drive, it could save you the hassle of restoring the backup.

Mechanical Failure :(. Should of mentioned that in my post. I just came back to my computer and something was making a beeping/scratching sound (hard to explain). I thought it came from one of my four CD-Drives, but then discovered it came from one of my HDs. Windows was responsive to mouse movements, but you couldn't do anything other than that. Then the sounds went away and windows was responsive again... then it came back... and at that point I knew it was my OS Drive. So I 'cut' the power off my computer to avoid further damage. I guess that last part where I cut off the power is kinda useless since I won't be sending this HD anywhere to have it repaired :(.

My computer is back up and running (just installed Windows into my storage drive). ... Im just too lazy (and kinda busy with school finals) to install anything.

I might spend some money and get a second, similar drive (Maxtor Diamond Max 9 Plus) and try to replace the head and motor... but thats kinda hopeless with the crap Im going to put on the platters while I do the operation :P.

Tyrdrium Said -
>>Or you could, y'know,
>>make backups of important
>>stuff. ;-)

What really pisses me off is that Ive always been putting it off. Everytime I uploaded my pictures into my computer, I think about of burning it onto a DVD... and then I end up "accidently" *missing* the Nero Desktop Icon and entering a cool game instead.

To double my problems... my PDA with a lot of documents (and end of the (school) year pictures and movies) on it just reset. I lost all my data on its onboard memory. My CF expansion card is still intact (data and all... or not all) but my backup.sav file JUST HAPPENS to be corrupted. ... I also had a backup on my PC drive, but that crashed too (as you already know)... :(

I love my luck. I bet the laptop Im typing this post on will crash or something.