I was clearing comment spam off of Otter Group's blogs the other day
when I noticed one from Disaster Recovery Group advertising their
ability to rescue data from crashed hard drives. This reminded me that
my laptop's hard drive crashed last October and has been sitting on my
desk since then. I'd managed to rescue all of my Otter Group data
(because I back it up religiously) but I'm much more lax about backing
up my personal data and hadn't done it in about a month. This wouldn't
have been a major disaster but then I discovered that my backup CD was
unreadable and that years of personal data was gone – everything from
Abigail's first once-upon-a-time stories that she dictated from age 2
to spreadsheets of the electrical circuits in our house.
After spending hours on the phone running diagnostics and trying to get the drive to boot, Dell tech support told me it was futile and that I should just give up. They sent me a new drive the next day.
I was supposed to send the old one back to Dell but I had been trying
to decide whether to spend lots of money on a data recovery service or
just accept the loss. A local recovery service had quoted me $750
minimum.
I was afraid to click through the comment spam to Disaster Recovery
Group but I did a web search and visited their web site and they seemed
completely legitimate. I requested a quote and they responded promptly
offering a free estimate and recovery fees of $250-$2500. I asked them
about the spam and they apologized and said they didn't know who sent
it but that it came from Russia or South America.
While waiting for the quote from Disaster Recovery Group I did some
more Googling and followed an ad at the top of the search results page
to Higher Ground Software. They sell a $70 piece of software called Hard Drive Mechanic:
dollars, try The Hard Drive Mechanic FIRST.
Since 1997 The Hard Drive Mechanic has been
making people like you an expert just long
enough to fix your crashed PC.
It offered a money back guarantee so I figured I had nothing to lose.
It took me about an hour to download, create a boot disk, swap the old
drive back in and run Hard Drive Mechanic following the brief but very
clear instructions and…it worked! Windows started and I recovered
everything.
Too bad Dell didn't recommend this or offer something like it. It's got
to be cheaper for them than hours of tech support and a new hard drive.
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