So, the inevitable happened...

[hendon]

I'm in New Zealand, but a couple of years ago I had the same thing happen. I sent the hard drive to specialist recovery people who would charge a couple of thousand dollars IF they could recover anything, but charge nothing if they retrieved nothing. Unfortunately they said the hard drive was too fried to recover anything. I've kept it though just in case one day someone else has another way of trying. I've got 6 months of my kids photos [at age 2 to 2 1/2] that I would love back.

[Myra]

Oh I am so very, very sorry to read this. Makes my heat sink for you Deb. Hugs.

[beehive50]

Originally Posted by Scrapbird

Before you give up, please get a second opinion. My son (who is a network administrator for the city of Portland OR) says that the Geek Squad folks are not always the best.

Originally Posted by dugarner

I would definitely get a second opinion. I didn't want to say anything at the beginning of this thread because I feel like I'm frequently negative, but I would never use Geek Squad. They have a horrible reputation and tend to be poorly trained and way overpriced. Ask around. I find it hard to believe that an EHD would be fried that bad---usually they simply fail, electronically, primarily.

If you can get power and get it to mount, you can usually recover a good bit of the data. If it is simply failing to mount, you can disassemble it and plug it in directly to your desktop computer's motherboard. That almost always works.

And there are a lot of places that use NSA-level recovery software that I'm sure charge less than that estimate.

Thanks everyone... and I do think I'll try to find someone else to look at it; might just be worth it in the end!

[esther_a]

Debi, that is sad news! Fingers crossed you can find someone who can do some magic for you!

[carollee]

Oh Debi, this gives me a pain in the pit of my stomach for you. {{hugs}}

[Standifg]

Debi ... I had a hard drive fail a few years ago and had a company look at it and they said they couldn't get anything off the drive. Well, my Mom's neighbor worked in the IT department at the local University. I asked him what he thought and he said "oh, I can look at it for you and probably work some magic". Well he did just that ... 3 days later he gave me a couple of discs with everything from my hard drive and charged me $100. The whiz kid down the street may do more for you than the so-called computer geek company. I think a lot of these companies know how "precious" the things are on our hard drives and quote a ridiculous amount of money thinking we will pay anything to get the stuff back. So, if you know any IT folks at a tech school/college/university/big business/etc., you may want to ask them for help. Good Luck!