www.deadharddrive.com

[novice973]

We are having problems with our hard drive. I have been using the PC off and on the whole day. When I know I will not be using it for a few hours, I would turn the PC off. During the evening, I turned on the PC and printed some stuff. I didn't turn the PC off. About an hour later, my husband tried to launch a game. The game hung and eventually showed a fatal error and ended. He tried this a few times. The performance on the PC seemed really slow. He tried to view the task list to see what was running. When it finally came up, the PC-cillen software was using memory but not CPU so he couldn't really see anything bad running. He tried to shut down. Since it was so slow, he couldn't get the shutdown dialog to appear, so, he just powered down the PC by holding down the power button for 5 secs.

When he restarted the PC, the screen flashed blue with some mumble jumble letters. Then, it said there is a problem with the hard drive. We tried to boot up in safemode, but, still had the problems. Then, a message to backup everything and replace the hard drive appeared. He tried to restart windows normally, this hung. He tried to start using last good config, that hung. He tried to start in safemode and a number of lines listed but then it hung.

I really don't know what is going on. The PC is not that old. We bought it in 2002. But, this is the 2nd time we had hard drive problem. The first time there was some unreadable sector. So, we bought 2 hard drives and loaded whatever data we can read to the HD. We used whatever data recovery tool to tried to recover the data. It worked somewhat but we still lost all our emails. The other HD, we used to store our backup. However, I don't know how vigilant we were in backing up. I think we have scheduled backup tasks, but don't know if the computer was kept on at time when backup task was suppose to take place.

Q1. If the PC is not on at the time of the scheduled tasks, will the system run the tasks the next time the PC is turned on?

Q2. I am very paranoid. If I take the HD to a shop, how can I be sure they didn't make a copy of the data on the HD? We have a lot of personal information on it.

Q3. If the HD is dead, how can they copy the data? Can we do this by ourselves?

Q4. Can anyone recommend a good HD?

BTW, I should have known something bad is happening. I heard some really loud whirling noises from the PC several days ago and did NOTHING. I should have immediately activated a backup. UGHHHH!

Thanks.

[NeGrusti]

Q1 -> Depends on settings in Scheduled Tasks
Q2 -> If the shop is a data recovery company, usually they have Non-disclosure Agreement form what can be signed.
Technically of course any recovery company has access to all drive files if they are not encrypted.
Q3 -> Depends on what's the damage
Q4 -> The brands are mostly of the same reliability (some models have occasional quirks, but that's not always common knowledge).
Seagate and WD provide 5 years warranty now.
You should EXPECT your HDD to fail, whatever is the make.