Well. it happened. My hard drive crashed - BIG TIME! It started making wierd noises - scratching & tapping & then LOUD knocking! Sounded like a Chevy motor! ROFL! Sometimes it booted up, sometimes not. When it wouldn't boot it also wouldn't let me run the restore disk. When it did boot, it ran fine & then after a bit it locked up.
Thank God for the extended warranty! Thursday nite the tech came over to the house & replaced the drive for FREE! I was so glad to be off the laptop I almost kissed the guy!
Now I have a problem - I lost ALL the stuff in my saved mails & all the bookmarked sites. The ones I am most concerned about are the tributes to 9/11 - all that is gone!
Does anyone still have some of the tribute sites & pics of 9/11? I'd really like to get that back. If you also have the cow sites you've been kind enough to send me or post here I'd appreciate that too. I'm just so down about all I lost - I had some digital pics of my Dad that I'd only stored here & now they're gone too. I'll never get those back either.
If anyone can help I'd be very thankful. There's no rush for this - I need to finish setting up this computer to what it used to have & that can take a bit.
BTW - he tried to format the drive to erase all my data (acct #'s, passwords, etc.) since he had to return it to Compaq & it died during the formatting - started knocking REAL loud! He said it's "unfixable" & not to worry & gave me a magnet to run over the drive but I'm still worried - does anyone know if it is impossible to retrieve that data now? I sure hope so! I'd feel awful for anyone trying to assume my identity - they'd be SO sorry they chose me - more problems than they'd be able to handle! ROFL!
Thanks everyone! Bye for now!

 

Hi cowlady,

Your sitution is sort of tricky in that you should have dropped us a line when your hard drive started making the funny noises. I'm sure someone here would have told you to back up the files you wanted right away.

Most of the time when hard drives go they just go and you don't have a chance to save your stuff. Most computer guys will tell you to back your stuff up on a regular basis, but the truth is most of us don't do it often enough.

When I lost my hard drive the only thing I really wanted on it was my Quicken files and I had been backing that up but not often enough so it took me a good 4 or 5 hours to rebuild my records to the point where I could balance our check book.

As to the security thing. I'm not sure what all you keep on your hard drive but I would think that the chances of someone retrieving the info off of it at comapaq are pretty slim. You can count on a few things.

1. Compaq is a big company and due to liablilty issue has a very strict written procedure for customer's data on damaged drives.

2. Most techs that work for comapaq are aware of the policy and would not want to risk their jobs to poke around someone elses data.

3. Hard drives are a comodity item in the industry. One breaks and they replace it. The reason they ask you to send it back is so that they are sure that it was replaced not so that they can try to fix it. So once they get it back they dispose of them.

4. I'm really not sure how well the big magnet trick works but my understanding is that short of fromatting the drive most data could be retrieved from a damged hard drive if someone wanted to put in the time, expense and effort to rebuild it.


all in all I would chalk this up to a learning experience and start backing up the stuff I really want to keep (CD writers are pretty cheap and easy to use and you can store a ton of stuff on a cd)
and I would worry more wbout my credit card in the hands of a waiter at a restaurant, than I would my hard drive in the hands of compaq

Sorry to hear about the loss of your dad's pictures. I had some sound files of my kids when they were very little and it sucked to loose those.

good luck with the new hard drive.