Hard drive died

[walrus]

Lost my hard drive in my laptop, no warning, no issues, just locked up using firefox.rebooted and got an error code 140-2000 I think it was. Can't get laptop to boot with recovery disk(or with a linux CD) when hard drive is in laptop. Take the hard drive out and it will boot. Any ideas how I can get my pics off the old drive. Anyone ever use one of those recovery services?

[Ralph Baer]

Re: Hard drive died

Lost my hard drive in my laptop, no warning, no issues, just locked up using firefox.rebooted and got an error code 140-2000 I think it was. Can't get laptop to boot with recovery disk(or with a linux CD) when hard drive is in laptop. Take the hard drive out and it will boot. Any ideas how I can get my pics off the old drive. Anyone ever use one of those recovery services?

if it is only the boot sector that is bad, you could put the hard drive in a case and use it as an external hard drive with another computer.

[walrus]

Re: Hard drive died

if it is only the boot sector that is bad, you could put the hard drive in a case and use it as an external hard drive with another computer.

Tried it, didn't work. I bought a 2.5 by 3.5 adapter so I could try in my desktop,hardware knew it was there but windows wouldn't pick it.

[joecct]

Re: Hard drive died

Which is why I have Carbonite. It won't backup the exe files, but the data files are fine.

Sounds like the FAT is gone (if they still use that thing). If you want to spend some $$, a recovery service can extract the stuff.

Good luck on the resurrection.

[BassAle]

Re: Hard drive died

after you get out of this mess (good luck!) make sure you do something for backups! I do backups on an external drive and an online service (backblaze, $5 per month unlimited amount of data)

In my experience hard drives fail more often than any other computer component. In my work-provided laptop I have a 512GB solid state drive, which is a more reliable than a traditional spinning disk and is super fast, but it is also super expensive (over $1000 for the disk drive).

[Nick Papagiorgio]

Re: Hard drive died

In my experience hard drives fail more often than any other computer component. In my work-provided laptop I have a 512GB solid state drive, which is a more reliable than a traditional spinning disk and is super fast, but it is also super expensive (over $1000 for the disk drive).

Affordable SSDs can't get here fast enough... It really is unreal how expensive they are right now, though.

[Tweedle Dee]

Re: Hard drive died

Affordable SSDs can't get here fast enough... It really is unreal how expensive they are right now, though.

Give it a 1 1/2 to 2 years before they become afoordable.

[BassAle]

Re: Hard drive died

Affordable SSDs can't get here fast enough... It really is unreal how expensive they are right now, though.

After having one in my work laptop for a few weeks I started pricing them out (256GB, no way I was going to pay for the 512GB SSD) for my home computer... then I decided I didn't really care that much if my computer could boot in 3 seconds. I _almost_ felt bad having my employer pay for a $1200 disk drive.

[Bigus Paulus]

Re: Hard drive died

Lost my hard drive in my laptop, no warning, no issues, just locked up using firefox.rebooted and got an error code 140-2000 I think it was. Can't get laptop to boot with recovery disk(or with a linux CD) when hard drive is in laptop. Take the hard drive out and it will boot. Any ideas how I can get my pics off the old drive. Anyone ever use one of those recovery services?

I had a similar situation a while back where my hard drive died and took the partitions with it. Now Windows only saw the drive as unpartitioned entity. I needed to recover 300Gigs worth of video files. After some research on the web I ended buying this great recovery software called Recover My Files. It wasn’t cheap ~$65, but you could download the software from their site and install it immediately. I was skeptical at first, but d*** did it work! It was able to recover every single video file off the drive that I had given up as lost. It wasn’t a fast process by any means, ~4hrs to complete, but it worked and there was much rejoicing. It was the best $65 I spent. If you’re still looking to recover your files I highly recommend this software.

[SteveP]

Re: Hard drive died

After having one in my work laptop for a few weeks I started pricing them out (256GB, no way I was going to pay for the 512GB SSD) for my home computer... then I decided I didn't really care that much if my computer could boot in 3 seconds. I _almost_ felt bad having my employer pay for a $1200 disk drive.

I'm considering this Seagate hybrid SSD.

500GB for a hundred bucks. Yeah, it's not blazing fast like a full SSD, but faster than what I have now.

Your thoughts on it?

[BassAle]

Re: Hard drive died

I'm considering this Seagate hybrid SSD.

500GB for a hundred bucks. Yeah, it's not blazing fast like a full SSD, but faster than what I have now.

Your thoughts on it?

I would definitely consider that if I were looking for a non SSD" drive. 7200RPM and 32MB of cache is pretty good for a 2.5" drive -- the budget laptop drives are still 5400RPM, and even a lot of the 7200 RPM drives in the $100 ballpark only have half as much cache. Now I am considering upgrading my hard drive in my personal laptop...

We are pretty spoiled at work -- the software developers in my group have 27" Apple displays, a MacBook Pro (our choice of screen size) w/ 8GB of RAM and 512GB SSD drives. We develop analysis tools that work on large data sets (and would often run out of memory back when 4GB was standard for our group).