Definitely back up. That's been preached time and time again here at the LPA.

Depending on what happened to your hard drive everything or most everything might be able to be recovered locally.
If it's a hardware problem, then the dish will need to be removed by a technician. That will cost you money and has to be done professionally.
IF its an os problem or a corrupt allocation table then the drive will need to be scanned by recovery software. Lots of software out there. Some better than others. Since you're computer is new I'm betting the drive still operates and you have a corrupt system. The important thing is to not try to recover it if you don't know what you are doing. Anything that gets written to the drive overwrites whats there and makes it unrecoverable. You could end up trashing all the files that could have been recovered.

I use R-studio. <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.data-recovery-software.net/">http://www.data-recovery-software.net/</a><;!-- m -->
If you attempt it yourself, make sure you read all the docs. carefully.

If you want to bring it in tomorrow I can bring in my laptop and do a quick scan to see where you stand, then go from there. I'm going to be pretty busy with the competition but I think I can get to it later in the night.

Maybe someone else that's reading this and has some experience may fill in. You may get the same offer from them.


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Let me know before the meeting.

If your platter is spinning that is good. If its making clunking sounds that bad.

A bad allocation table or corrupt partition will not be able to be seen by the systems basic operating system but specialized software could.

The meetings starts winding down about 8PM, sometimes 9. It all depends. We have to be out by 9 so everyone starts leaving about 8:45 for sure. I'm thinking that if you're going to be late then there is not enough time to scan the drive. It may take an hour or so.

Another thing you can do is to take it over to Superior Electronics (10th and K, Lancaster). They can take a look and let you know what's going on. You'll most likely have to pay for that though. They diagnose computers for free so maybe you will fall in that category. At least you will know where you stand.


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