**broken link removed**
It had been a hell-of-a day: up at the crack of 8:30am. Had to drive ten miles to a pub in the country for lunch and a pint with the misuse. A couple of hours in the library in Weston super Mare reading the papers. Coffee and donut in The Coffee House and finally managed to get on the laptop by 7pm after dinner. Ploughed through the thousand-and-one emails: get a Tai wife for £200, fabulous holidays from Saga, cure for your erection problems, you have won $10, 000, and so on.
Then got down to the real stuff… ETO, electronics, computers, and a bit of Wikipedia editing. After a while I fancied a beer but, like a half-wit, managed to splash a small amount of beer on the Ultrabay door at the side of the Lenovo T520 laptop. This caused Win10 to report that the Hitachi Travelstar 1 TB Hard Disk Drive (HDD) in the Ultrabay could not be accessed on the next reboot. As this HDD contains all my user files, which had not been backed up since end Dec 2015, I was in a state of doom and gloom.
I tried to revive the HDD by drying off a drop of beer on it, then baking it at 60 deg C for 2 hours, then washing it in isopropyl alcohol (IPA) and baking it at 60 deg C for 24 hours, but all to no avail- the platter simply refused to spin up. What annoys me is that I have been so stupid and not backed up for that long, especially as 4TB of Network Access Storage (NAS) is on-line in our house, so it was just a matter of pressing the button to do the job.
In desperation, I Googled data recovery firms. The first to pop up was Fields Data Recovery who advertised a not-to-bad charge of £130 UK to recover the data from your hard drive. But when I Googled them for problems I found they were a rip off outfit, with many shadow companies, who did more damage than good and also ended up charging a fortune for ‘extras’. http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=2520295#topofpage
But Kroll On Track have good reports, but are hellish expensive at £300 UK to £1.2K UK depending on the work involved, so I intend to send off my errant HDD to them to get a free quotation. Fingers crossed that it is not more than the former or I won’t bother. http://www.krollontrack.co.uk/data-...Eow5dK0G9_2AJk35QEyuBDYd-cDOayuw0DhoCQczw_wcB
You tend to learn from your experiences, good or bad. For example, I always thought that HDD platters and heads were contained in a hermetically sealed chamber with a small valve to release any air pressure, but this is not the case. The mechanical parts are in a chamber but the hole only has a filter over it to prevent debris ingress. I also found out about the dark side of data recovery services.
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