As above please,loads of photo’s of the kid’s as new born’s etc

Often it is do-able, what kind of death was it? Fire? Water? Just stopped moving?

Just stopped moving. Wouldn’t start up just kept rebooting

If you go the Data recovery route avoid the £99 ‘any problem any fix type’ as they often don’t fix them and leave the drive in an unrepairable state.

Try someone reputable like Uk nationwide data recovery will give you a free quote and will often look at the drive to see if it’s recoverable before embarking on any work.

Still looking at £300-500 for a 500gb drive (last quote I had for a mechanical failure)

First step, if it’s your boot disk, try installing it in another working computer (or get a USB caddy for it), as often you can get data off a disk which won’t boot.

Friend had this with an external disk, actual disk died, 3 years of baby photos etc. He took it to a good data recovery place, 500 quid later and he had his pics back. Now he owns two external drives.

Having said that, if it is starting up then rebooting not just stopping then it may be that there is still a somewhat working disk, on mine it just stops if it can’t find a disk at all.

I would first find someone who knows enough about computers to stick the drive in an external drive caddy or another pc, and then if that doesn’t work, go to a good data recovery company and get your wallet ready.

Get a linux live disc like ubuntu. It will boot off the cd drive, you should then be able to mount the hard drive and copy them off.

I think theres a ubuntu disk on the front of one of the linux monthlys this month.

2nd the USB caddy option. Booting puts more load on the drive, USB caddy gives you a good chance of recovering some images.

I had a drive stop working and computer reported ‘no system disc’ at boot, but it was able to read the contents using a caddy.

However, it’s likely to be in it’s last legs so once you’ve copied it, back up (and back that up!)

p.s. Only saying ‘back up’ as I feel the pain, rather than being smug ‘captain hindsight’! 😉

If you can see it using the caddy, but not read from it, then the Ubuntu option above it good too.

I recovered 20,000 photos from a drive that was wiped during a backup that went faulty! Ubuntu read it and pulled back the lot – wedding photos, riding shots, all sorts.

Hence why I now run one backup every couple of weeks and another one on a totally seperate removeable drive every few months or so.

I would first find someone who knows enough about computers

… always the best advice.

Wouldn’t start up just kept rebooting

If it’s a system disk that’s not booting then it might just be a problem with the OS, and not a physical problem. In which case you’re golden, getting the data off it is easy. As others have said, a Live CD or transplanting the disk to a caddy or another machine are all reasonable lines of attack.

If it is actually inaccessible, I’ve had good results with Recuva recently.

Whatever you decide to do, the moral of this story is, take backups in future.

try SPINRITE, just ignore the cheesy american infomercial type pitch. This has helped me recover data a couple of times in the past. If that fails, as a very, very last resort try the freezer trick. Again, this has worked for me in the past but YMMV. I’d say it is only an absolute last ditch solution, when you have tried everything else.

Ah, Steve Gibson. There’s a blast from the past.

Please, OP, do not put your disk in the freezer until you’ve had a techie check it out and give up.

I’ve used the freezer trick in the past, but then again, I’m one of those techie people 🙂