hard drive crash?...need help

[cotis]

hey there,

was burning some DVDs and opened mozilla and my computer was being REALLY slow. so it took awhile. then all of a sudden a little yellowish popup from microsoft pops up in hte bottom right, says "Data write to K:/ failed, data lost". I was burning stuff from my external (K:/) to a DVD and this happened.

I tried restarting and everything and everything on my harddrive is gone. When I click on it in my comptuer it asks me if I'd like to format.

any help??

[The Chad Cometh]

Time to take your hard drive to a data recovery centre I feel. Fucking expesive though.
If you're in Australia and around North Sydney (I work in the Apple Centre), I could probably get one of the boys here at work to have a look at it for you and try to get the data off (the same thing happened to a mate of mine)

[cotis]

live in the US in NJ. hard drive recovery isnt cheap though right?

[Genesis]

Yeah, looks like it's gone. Data Recovery is the probably the only way. Very expensive and not worth it unless you have some reeaaally important data on it, like nuclear launch codes .

P.S: You can try plugging it into a Linux box and give it a try sometimes. I've recovered an entire hard disk (a few pins connecting to the IDE cable were broken) successfully using Linux. It'll throw up a bunch of errors, but I managed to copy over 8GB of data, whereas Windows wouldn't even detect the disk. Mostly won't work if it's NTFS though.

[The Chad Cometh]

The last customer we sent to data recovery was charged over $1000 AUS to get their data. Needless to say they weren't too happy.
I guess he should have backed up those wedding photos huh? 

[cotis]

 

I found this program, Recover My Files, I'm running it right now and I guess it's finding some files on my hard-drive. Going to take nearly all night though. Hopefully it finds the stuff I really really need.

[Chief]

good luck man! i think a recovery service is the best way to get the most data back but hopefully that program helps. let us know!