Failed Hard Drive

Question

Hello I hope someone can give me some advice.  We purchased a Dell Notebook 600m Inspirion about 21/2 years ago for our Daughter.  The PC has gone down twice in this time.  The first time we were able to retreve all Pics.,Doc etc...Theis time the Hard Drive is in complete Mechanical Failur. I Was Adviced by Dell to bring the PC to a local Pc repair shop which I did today.  They are telling me that the hard drive need to go out for reair they called it a Level 3.  With the cost of $1599 and a $96 Additional charge to see if they can rebuild the drive and get all the info. we need.  The problem is that this to me seem like allot of money. My Daughter is devasted!! All of her Portoflio for graduation is on there and many Pics.  What are my options w/out spending all that money. Thank You Deb:smileysad:

ejn63 · Answer

If the drive is as far gone as that, you don't have many options - if you need the data back, that's actually quite a reasonable fee for data recovery.

Going forward, you need to realize that ALL hard drives eventually fail, and that it is absolutely essential to keep backups. A few dollars in blank CD or DVDs, or $100 or less in an external hard drive, would have saved you the $1600-1700 it will cost because you didn't back up.

workinmomma7 · Answer

I know I have everything backed up on the family desttop.  You know Teens they don't think that this will happen to them and when it does it's like there life has come crashing down.  Ok well thanks for the insight of cost. Deb

MoneyGuyBK · Answer

In that case, since you already have a backup made, forego the repairs.

Buy a new HDD, and restore your files back for your child.

I backup my files on a regular basis. My I8000 HDD died just last week, and I can buy a 60Gig (Twice my dead HDD) for about $65 and put it in. It will cost me that plus my time, still less expensive and less headache than if I did not backup and had to do data recovery.

Peace

workinmomma7 wrote:

I know I have everything backed up on the family destop. You know Teens they don't think that this will happen to them and when it does it's like there life has come crashing down. Ok well thanks for the insight of cost. Deb

jcn77056 · Answer

What they're doing is sending the hard drive to a recovery service who will take the drive apart in a clean room (yes, the guys with the suits), fix what's broken and copy your data onto another drive.  I know you're kids won't appreciate it but don't do it.  It's a lesson in backups.  You should backup everything.   You can replace the hard drive easily with a small screwdriver and a new hard drive.  Follow the instructions in the service manual for your PC and remove the hard drive.  Take the drive out of the carrier and either take it to your local PC parts dealer or order a replacement online.  Once you get the new drive, reverse what you did and then re-install the operating system and applications.    After you get the system up and running again, teach your young'n how to backup.   If you need more specific instructions, feel free to ask or check out some of my other posts.

CrystalBlue wat · Answer

Basiclly the same thing happened to my daughter in college - junior year. She had all of her internship write up's (over 40 pages) and research papers along with pictures, music, etc... and had not backed up for quite some time.  We shopped around for computer repairs and found someone to do a limited recovery for about $500.  We told her that we could only do the data recovery, songs, pictures, and other things were gone.  She now has a portable drive and backs up regularly!  The long and short of this is to shop around a bit and let them know what you need recovered.  I'm not sure but I would think it is a bit harder to recover pictures and music than straight data.

Storage, Drives & Media

Failed Hard Drive

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