Quote Originally Posted by IainBusby View Post
A technician can't really help you if, as Keith says, your hard disk has died, you've lost all of your photos, movie clips, mp3's etc and you haven't made a backup.
Depends how it died Iain, a dead IDE or SATA interface on the drive can be pretty fatal at least it's not easy to fix, definitely a return to a specialist for a new board assuming the specific board is still available.

On a drive that has bad sectors or a drive that is nearing general physical failure (bad bearing maybe) it will still usually be possible to recover large amounts of your data if you act quickly.

Logical errors like a damaged partition table, damaged MFT's or corrupt boot loader are not usually fatal there are lots of good recovery programs that will find lost partitions, lost files, etc.

My personal favourite is Winhex, if it can be recovered Winhex will get it back but it is not a user friendly program, best left to a specialist (I am not offering anyone any help here, life is too short to specialise in disk recovery folks )

Winhex is quite cheap but as I said it's hard to use and you will usually need a new disk as big as the one you are trying to recover, during recovery never write to the disk you are trying to recover

Keith is absolutely right, always backup, disk space is cheap these days and online space is getting cheaper every few months.



Jim

Jim