[anso]

Hi,
Some time ago I wasn't able to start my laptop. I had it fixed by Compaq but all I had on it was gone.
Since I had all my photos on it it was quite depressing.
But, I heard that it's possible to restore it and "find" my photos.
Is it so? Where can I find anyone to fix it?

[ontheroad]

I've been going through the exact same thing, brought the computer to a random shop in Wanchai Computer Center and asked them to do what they can do retrieve data from the dead hard disk they removed to put in a new one, they said it would take a while to find out if they could retrieve anything. I'm still waiting. Apparently these things take time... they have a lot of shops in WCC that advertise themselves as "data recovery" specialists. Have you tried any of them?

[DavidHK]

there are data recovery services but before you rush off to them it would be worth finding out what repair work compaq did. At best they have formatted the drive and reinstalled the OS which may have have overwritten some of the data that used to be on it (I say may as I only just understand how these things work and the subject of file allocation tables and data recovery is best left to people who know more than me). At worst they have put in a new hard drive. In that case no amount of recovery is going to help.

[chowfun]

I know I'm being obvious by saying "You need to back everything up."

Get one, two or even three portable hard drives. Every few weeks, sync your computer to a drive and rotate. At the current prices, there is almost no reason to risk losing all your memories over $99 USD.

[Boris]

Make a call to Edison Chan - he knows a guy who is good getting stuff off a hard drive !

[emmie]

Originally Posted by ontheroad

I've been going through the exact same thing, brought the computer to a random shop in Wanchai Computer Center and asked them to do what they can do retrieve data from the dead hard disk they removed to put in a new one, they said it would take a while to find out if they could retrieve anything. I'm still waiting. Apparently these things take time... they have a lot of shops in WCC that advertise themselves as "data recovery" specialists. Have you tried any of them?

Hey, loadsa precious pics are also in my ancient PC hard disk, gathering dust. One day, the screen went black, the machine rattled and wheezed like an ole geezer, absolutely refusing to startup!

Let us know when you hear back about your disk from the Wanchai restorers (how long has it been with them?). Would like to try them out if they've succeeded with yours. Fingers crossed...

[pug_ster]

I fixed my brother's computer before with data corruption before. I can't say much about anso's hard drive because there is a good chance that they wiped out the hard drive's data.

If you still have your bad hard drive you can probably buy an external enclosure and attach the hard drive into it. Assuming that you don't have any hardware problems, if you can't read the data, run a chkdsk and scan to attempt repair of bad sectors.

[jayinhongkong]

External hard disks fail, so if your data is really important, burn it off onto DVDs.

[jgl]

Originally Posted by jayinhongkong

External hard disks fail, so if your data is really important, burn it off onto DVDs.

Writable DVDs/CDs have a shelf life though, typically given in the vicinity of 5ish years. I've had CDs last longer, but wouldn't be willing to consider them as a long term storage solution.

My current approach involves 2 external hard drives. They will eventually fail, but I'll copy the data to new drives before that happens. Using a couple of external hard drives is cheap, and really convenient.

Actually, my current approach also involves leaving backups with friends in other countries and using Amazon S3 storage, but I'm a leeetle paranoid about keeping data . I've got email that go back to '93.

[chowfun]

Agreed. I've used DVD+RW before and they are time consuming and more easily corrupted or spoiled. You'll also need quite a few discs if you have a lot of photos, videos and songs. 2 portable hard drives are more than sufficient for maintaining backup copies of all your data.