Yvi

And now for the age-old dilemma of coping when a hard drive goes kaput and you've been lax about remembering to back things up.

I tried to boot my laptop yesterday and got nothing but a black screen with a blinking cursor. Running recovery and trying to boot from the OS disk got me nothing; I didn't have a CD for the drivers, so I couldn't run that, but I'm fairly sure it wouldn't have done anything. Removing the battery and the hard drive by turns confirmed that this is definitely a hard drive problem.

At the moment, I feel like such a moron for not being better about backing things up. Just dorky little things like fic and music and my bookmarks and that folder of lulzy fandom stuff I liked to browse when I needed a pick-me-up and, yeah, this all sounds like it doesn't matter but it's a good few months' worth experiences that I currently can't access and I KNOW IT'S MY FAULT. But I'm still wondering if it'd be worth it to send the hard drive off and see if anything can be salvaged.

I've found a couple places that seem pretty good both in terms of speed and price, and there's no charge if they can't recover anything at all. Has anyone done this before? (And if so, did you feel preemptively embarrassed about the tech support team laughing for hours/recoiling and vomiting at the crap they run into?)

And now for the age-old dilemma of coping when a hard drive goes kaput and you've been lax about remembering to back things up.

I tried to boot my laptop yesterday and got nothing but a black screen with a blinking cursor. Running recovery and trying to boot from the OS disk got me nothing; I didn't have a CD for the drivers, so I couldn't run that, but I'm fairly sure it wouldn't have done anything. Removing the battery and the hard drive by turns confirmed that this is definitely a hard drive problem.

At the moment, I feel like such a moron for not being better about backing things up. Just dorky little things like fic and music and my bookmarks and that folder of lulzy fandom stuff I liked to browse when I needed a pick-me-up and, yeah, this all sounds like it doesn't matter but it's a good few months' worth experiences that I currently can't access and I KNOW IT'S MY FAULT. And the silver lining is that I CAN MAKE MORE and let myself be unhindered by all that schlock, right? But I'm still wondering if it'd be worth it to send the hard drive off and see if anything can be salvaged.

I've found a couple places that seem pretty good both in terms of speed and price, and there's no charge if they can't recover anything at all. Has anyone done this before? (And if so, did you feel preemptively embarrassed about the tech support team laughing for hours/recoiling and vomiting at the crap they run into?)