Because it's FUNNIER, DAMMIT

[drwex]

The new Dell is en route to me. I'm managing to keep my obsession with the thing down to checking the Fedex tracking page only two or three times a day. Sigh. 26th or maybe 25th.

Meanwhile, we've been using Pygment's old Mac laptop. It's about 4 years old, nice machine. Macs. Very reliable. Uh... honey? Why am I staring at a blank white screen? **LE SIGH**

Friday night the damned thing bricked itself. Badly. No booting, no lie. Off we go to the Apple store, whose first diagnosis is that it's a fried motherboard.

That leads to the purchase of a new laptop. There's not much point in sinking hundreds into a new motherboard for a 4-year-old machine when it was getting slow and full anyway. New Macs are expensive, mind you. A bit more than my new Dell. But unlike the Dell we can just copy over all the stuff from the old laptop and be up in no ti... err, what do you mean we can't? It's not the motherboard after all? It's the hard disk? Locked up solid, you say? You can't get any data off of it, you say?

Excuse me, I'll be weeping pitifully over here in the corner. Data lost include all the music we ripped to iTunes, two weeks worth of game notes not yet uploaded, a new story Pygment was writing, and all our financial records from Quicken.

(Possible solutions: we have copies of most of the music elsewhere; we have a 2-month-old backup of the Quicken data, plus my compulsive paper record-keeping; the game notes are probably lost, but...)

Today Pygment took the dead hard drive to a data recovery place downtown that claims to specialize in Macs only. That's heartening, and scary - they ought to know what they're doing, but is there really enough of this to keep them in business? And if so, what does that say about the product?

So, um, remember that bit where I wanted to keep expenditures under $1k? Yeah, not so much. We're well north of $3k and still counting.

Comments

[sweetmmeblue.livejournal.com]

And I hate to add this, photos that we can't replace. I SOOOO Hope they can get all this off the HD.

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

Poop! I wish I'd known this was all going on. The Apple Store told us our hard drive was locked and unrecoverable, too. We brought the laptop home, got a new enclosure, used Disk Tools, and got the data off it before it gave up the ghost.

The Geniuses are not as Genius as one would like to think.

[drwex]

I'm not too stressed about the new laptop part - we sort of wanted one. The alternative was going to be upgrading the memory and disk in the old enclosure anyway. Losing the data will suck.

I'm hoping that the data recovery place can do something good with the old brick.

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

I think I was perhaps not clear enough.

They told us the hard drive was unrecoverable. We pried it loose from the laptop, put it in an enclosure, and recovered all the data. The Genius Bar guys didn't have a clue as to how to get the data off, but we did it with no trouble and no expenditure of cash (beyond the enclosure). I know data recovery places are expensive, and I wish I could have shared my experience with you so you could have taken a shot at it on your own first.

I would say that it's just the local Genius Bar guys that are idiots, but that's the second time I've gotten data from a hard drive on this laptop that they said was unrecoverable without spending thousands at a data-recovery place. (The first time was in LA.) I think they're trained not to try very hard, or something.

[drwex]

Ah, this is still good info. The data place is supposed to tell us whether/what they think they can get off of it. They have an initial evaluation fee of something like $50 or so, and then tell us what they think the recovery will cost. If they come in with a high number we might back off and try the enclosure/Disk Tools route ourselves. If it's a low enough number we may just let them go ahead.

[ciani.livejournal.com]

well you know.... there was the time I got really annoyed and slammed my hands down on the laptop right on top of the harddrive. that kind of sucked. harddrives go though, and I think that, overall, they've gotten worse over the years. We get harddrives failing in new servers and pcs at work all the time. I remember some sales person telling me once in the last couple years about how most harddrives are made by the same few manufacturers and then branded.

[drwex]

It's true - there are only 2 or 3 base manufacturers for drives left in the world. There's packaging and software on top of that, but inside it's pretty much all the same hardware.

[unseelie.livejournal.com]

the reason a GOOD data recovery place is expensive is they throw all sorts of crazy tech at the problem. And depending on the problem; often have good luck recovering MOST of the data.

The most exreme recoveries i have heard of have included 'the house burned down' and such.

the spinning platters get removed from the hard drive in a class 10000 (7 times cleaner than an operating room) environment, and then placed in a reader that spins; so the platters don't have to spin. (in case the platters were damaged)

where things get wonky is if the data was over written *before* or During the Failure.

...
Hi! I sometimes do data recovery. :-D
Yes; A new enclosure and disk tools often can get the data back.

COSTCO recently had 320 and 500 gig external hard drives for real cheap; i picked one up and have saved my music and pics to it - and keep in on a shelf.
Of course; this means i have to remember to back up new music, pics and records (I TRY to do it when i pay my bills; take care of life maintenence all at once) sometimes i even succeed at remembering!

I wish you much much luck!

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

I've twice gotten my data back with a new enclosure and Disk Tools when the Genius Bar guys said the hard disks were bricked. It's a good first step.

[taura-g.livejournal.com]

OUCH! I'm sorry hon, I'm going to guess this is why we didn't see you today.

Good luck with the data recovery.

[drwex]

Thanks babe. We were hiding from the cold temps, and Liam was still "off" a bit. Plus I really didn't have anything to contribute and didn't want to take home more stuff.