http://www.ontrack.com/ I believe is the URL
NFP
Do you have a hammer?
One time at work something similar happened to a mac drive. We shipped it to symantec and they were able to recover the data. That was 4 years ago and I think it cost $2-300.
$250 cookie recipe:
(Recipe may be halved.):
2 cups butter
4 cups flour
2 tsp. soda
2 cups sugar
5 cups blended oatmeal**
24 oz. chocolate chips
2 cups brown sugar
1 tsp. salt
1 8 oz. Hershey Bar (grated)
4 eggs
2 tsp. baking powder
3 cups chopped nuts
2 tsp. vanilla (your choice)
Cream the butter and both sugars. Add eggs and vanilla; mix
together with flour, oatmeal, salt, baking powder, and soda. Add
chocolate chips, Hershey Bar and nuts.
Roll into balls and place two inches apart on a cookie sheet.
Bake for 10 minutes at 375 degrees. Makes 112 cookies.
** measure oatmeal and blend in a blender to a fine powder.
Best Buy did mine for $60.00 last year. I don't know if that's a good price, but it was well worth it to me. Good luck!
Data recovery will cost about $600. I have seen widespread hard drive crashes on laptops in recent years. Usual symptoms: runs fine, then a couple of lockups, then ocassional blue screen crashes, then failue. Usually occurs over several days time.
It must be zero or your drives will not be recognized.
BUMP
OK, Don't Laugh, but this just recently happened to my daughter.
Same symptoms, it was either there and empty or not there at all.
Turns out to have been the hdd controller, which was surface mounted to the motherboard (HP laptop)
I suggested she put the entire laptop in the fridge, get all the components very cold (she almost froze the LCD liquid!) then give it a try.
In a word - WORKED!!
for about 30 minutes, which was long enough.
Good Luck
I'm am pretty sure that the technical reason this happened to your drive is -- IT'S GEORGE W. BUSH'S FAULT!!!
That reminds me. I better back up my drive.
I remember one time my hard drive crashed and it wouldn't even reboot. I took it to some computer guru - he tried to boot it a few times, while stroking his long beard.
He then banged the computer a few times and it booted right up. He then said that will be fifty bucks. He said my hard drive is about to crash for good so I better back up.
Try banging on the hard drive a few times. It has worked for me twice after that throughout the years.
P.S. Let me know if it works.
You may be able to recover all or most of the data if it was formatted NTFS originally. I've done so a half a dozen times whea a drive's $MFT went pffsst! A small inexpensive application called File Scavenger will do the trick. As a matter of fact, it will even recover data from a reformatted drive. Let me know if you need more info or help in finding or using the program. When I lose a drive these days, my blood pressure actually drops. I get to have some fun.
Next time Ghost your machine. Cheap insurance for about $30.00....and send the image to a second HD.
OnTrack is going to be your best bet...
I'm running IDE RAID1 (Mirrored) drives. Drives are cheap and it is worth the few extra dollars for the peace of mind.
Many system boards support IDE RAID out of the box.
I also have a personal practice of backing my wife's and my documents to a CD every 6 months.
BTW. Once you have your data back, consider using a hard drive to back up your hard drive. I do this and once you get past the initial expense of a second hard drive, removable drive bay or USB case, there is nothing better. You set it to back up before you go to bed. No disk flipping, no fuss. I back up a lot more frequently now that I have this in place.
"Hello.... my name is Steven Thrasher...."
http://stretta.com/~matthew/other/angry/mp3/helpdesk.mp3
(Warning: naughty language)
it could have been simply a defective surface area probably somewhere in the FAT area.
The hard drives are so low cost they are NOT providing any QC - people cost money!
We have our choices - cheap or good - good being defined as tested through a good QC program and backed with PRIDE by the manufacturer.
I hate when that happens.