Bad news…

steviejr92

Authorized Vendor
So my computer went to shit. The hard drive is messed up. It doesn’t want to rotate I can hear it in there. This means all of my work is gone…every design, my logo, all the stuff I was doing for the contest literally everything….this is going to take awhile to recover…..smh I don’t if I should take it in or what see if they can recover anything.
 
Suck. I've had HDD's and SSD's both die on me. I back up everything on another drive and in the cloud at this point. I hope you have luck getting everything recovered.
 
I just called a spot they gave me a quote of 500 to 1500 bucks 👀 looks like I’m not getting it recovered. I’m gonna see if I can just buy another hard drive and install it and just start new 😖
 
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Crap and adapter that will allow you plug the hard drive into your usb port and see if you can get it to do anything. I get them off of eBay for a little bit of nothing.
 
You can get a hard drive adapter to plug the drive into your usb port. If it’s recoverable you’ll be able to do it that way. This is the last one I bought because I needed to recover a SATA hard drive, which I still need to do.
 
You can get a hard drive adapter to plug the drive into your usb port. If it’s recoverable you’ll be able to do it that way. This is the last one I bought because I needed to recover a SATA hard drive, which I still need to do.
Ok def going this route before dishing out money!
 
An adapter isn't going to be much help if the drive has a mechanical failure.
I think that’s what it is. I can hear it do some funny noises. I’m really not sure what to do here probably gonna have to suck it up and buy a new one and install it in the comp.
 
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An adapter is useful if the PC or motherboard fails but the drive is still in good working condition.

It gives you an easy way to connect the drive to another PC (or laptop) without having to physically install it.

Now, it's not completely impossible that the HDD controller on the motherboard is malfunctioning causing the drive to misbehave... It's a long shot, but if the only other option is complete data loss it might be worth giving an adapter a shot. (or installing the drive as a secondary in another PC if you have one)

I should also learn from this and take some time to backup my own data... I regularly backup the PCB stuff, but my personal data is just winging it. :ROFLMAO:
 
So I got brave here and took out the hard drive I looked at YouTube to see if I can spot a problem. The hard drive itself look good the arm that reads the disk is perfectly fine. Idk what the hell is going.
 
Just for the heck of it, try plugging it into a different SATA port and/or PSU cable if you have one free.
I actually don’t have another one. My dell laptop keeps giving me a failure code that when I looked it up says the hard drive is pretty much dead but I don’t want to accept that hahah
 
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I’d second the adapter option. But if a second computer isn’t recognizing it then maybe it’s just goneburger. Sorry.

A good option going forward is some sort of cloud storage, either something like Dropbox/OneDrive or a repository like GitHub. I prefer GitHub but it’s not for storing large files, for pedal projects it tends to be fine.
 
So my computer went to shit. The hard drive is messed up. It doesn’t want to rotate I can hear it in there. This means all of my work is gone…every design, my logo, all the stuff I was doing for the contest literally everything….this is going to take awhile to recover…..smh I don’t if I should take it in or what see if they can recover anything.

Don't FREAK OUT remain calm. Hope is not yet lost. I'm a professional, made my entire career being 'the computer guy'. From data entry to systems programmer, custom code, director of IT, I've done it all.

SATA cables are notorious for coming loose. That includes the power cable. Open your computer up, remove the cables FROM BOTH SIDES, the mother board as well as the drive. Blow on them to dislodge any dust, put them back in place and wiggle them around. This happens to my computer at least once a year. They have locking sata cables but they don't fit my antique.

Slap it back together and turn it on. If you STILL don't get any results try a different sata port on the motherboard.

If this doesn't work you can get a system recovery disk (you made one like they told you to, right?). Ok, if you didn't you can order one off of ebay for your OS. Like 'system recovery disk for windows 7'. If there's a software problem with your boot sector this may fix it.

If you STILL don't get any results the next step is to find someone with a working computer, and piggyback your drive as a secondary hard drive on their system to see if maybe just the boot sector was corrupted. If so, you may be able to transfer the contents of your hard drive to another location and at least save data.

They used to have what was called Destructive read recovery services, where the head would ride on the surface of the disk getting data as it crunched its was across the drive. I don't see that on the internet tho.... Feel free to contact me if you have problems, this is what I did for a living along with phone systems, and stringing data cables and all the other crap you have to do as 'the computer guy' in a company.
 
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