One Members Experience with Hard Drive Recovery Software (a happy ending!)
One of our members a few months back had a troubling issue with his Prestige:
I recently had a hard drive fail on my Prestige with Smart Edit 8.0. I tried waiting for hours to boot up, tried inserting a Smart Edit card, freezing the drive in the freezer, and nothing has worked. I know I should have backed things up but I did not. Other hard drives worked in this Prestige, but the one I had hours of work on was just showing the hour glass thing while I cried and prayed in desperation!
Casablanca community member Robert Savetsky shared this suggestion with our colleague: "Go to the hard drive manufacturers website and download diagnostic & recovery software. Make a boot-able floppy disk or CD and boot with drive (removed from Prestige) installed in PC that uses IDE drives. Run recovery to see if it is really a hardware failure, over the years I have recovered 4 out of 5 IBM / Hitachi drives this way. If diagnostic software finds and corrects a bad sector problem just place the hard drive back in Prestige and turn on."
Our colleague continues: But Robert's method worked and as he said in his post, he used that method successfully with 4 out of 5 Hitachi IBM hard drives. That's 80%! My success rate is 1 out of 1 for 100%! The hard drive was completely recovered with all the projects and files as if nothing ever happened, although I have certainly aged a bit more prematurely. Thank God they let you download the recovery software for FREE!
Maybe there is a bad sector but the diagnostic software takes care of it. Is that a miracle or is that magic? I'll take it either way! I've also had other failed hard drives recovered from PCs but the going rate is around $300. Wouldn't you think we would be smart enough to back things up more often?
Tips & Tutorials by the Casablanca Expert, Chet Davis
www.CasablancaExpert.com