Am I F****D?

My non BEF hard drive containing two and half years worth of work from the National Archives has just this minute gone completely blank-Am I f**ked or is the info recoverable?

I feel utterly sick to the pit of my stomach right now

 

Oh no - I feel your pain - the amount of people I know who have lost their thesis is unreal.

Can you see the device on your computer when you plug it in?

 

Oh s**t. Been there...

Is it in your PC or an external?

I'm out of date with recovery programmes but the general rule used to be that the better they are, the more they cost. Will have a think (and hope the real experts turn up in the meantime).

 

Managed to recover data from a dead hard drive with help from a techie friend, so all may not be lost.

I always back up my data on online storage, lots of free space on google drive etc.

 

Its a portable hard drive, 2TB size. I just copied a war diary on to disc to post to someone and when I formatted the next disc I went to the hard drive and it was empty so 1.5TB worth of files have disappeared. I've tested my BEF portable hard drive and all is well with that one.

I can't store online as my internet speed is slightly faster than dial up-It would take forever.

Hard drive needs to go to a shop-Can I trust PC World not to make matters worse?

A still very gutted Andy

 

Might be better off looking at professional recovery. Googling hard drive recovery leeds brings up a number of possibles. Do you know anyone who might be able to offer a recommendation - IT at work, anyone Andrea knows?

Just don't fiddle with it for now...

 

Don't touch it. Other than that can't help, but good luck!

All the best

Andreas

 

Have you tried switching everything off then back on again?

can you *see* the hard drive.

with luck it may be a bad connection or power supply fault, rather than the hard drive itself. Best of luck with it.

 

If luck's on your side then it is the controller in the enclosure that's faulty rather than the hard drive itself.
That would be an easy and cheap fix, just need to buy a new external enclosure.

Is the drive powering up and can you hear it spinning? Presumably you've unplugged the USB and restarted computer?

 

I feel your pain. This must be the worst nightmare of all researchers and collators.

 

Restarted PC and Hard Drive and still the same - I can see the Hard Drive and it says I have 1.81 TB available of space with nothing in it ie it's empty.

Make is WD

 

I can feel it spinning when it's connected up.

 

Do not attempt to reformat or copy anything to the drive. The data will still be physically on the disk and may be recoverable depending on what has caused the fault.

 

I connected up my BEF hard drive to the same laptop and that works OK. Just going to try the f****ed one on my old laptop.

So the 64,000 dollar Q......Where do I take it, if not PC World?

 

Andy

google data recovery Leeds (as Idler suggested)

a number come up

have you tried a different usb cable

I had an external WD do exactly the cable caused fault

 

Can't emphasise this enough.
A problem with some of these drives is not the actual drive but the shit cheap connectors they use.
Never had to recover anything, but I think professional services can be expensive.
Def not use PC world, they are probably like Halfords technicians......

anyone have recommendations?

 

Yep, Used both cables on both hard drives and still the same. Tried blank hard drive on another lap top and still showing blank.

 

might help


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