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I have dozens of irreplaceable photos on an external hard drive. Last week the drive was knocked of my desk and now i can no longer access the drive. I,m very computer literate and have tried everything including data recovery software but to no avail, my only hope is a clean room where it can be stripped and hopefully get my photos loaded onto another drive. Can anyone help?
Sounds like a case for your local IT geeks, unless you are up to repairing hard drives. 
If it's a hardware damage issue, software solutions won't cure it. Doesn't seem, on the face of it, like a problem which cannot be solved. Will cost some money, of course, but if the photos are irreplaceable then that's got to weigh in the balance.
that's reel bad luck, i am glad i keep mine on the floor under the table, and i do back up to another one i keep out of the house.
Depends if it's the disc or the mechanism that's broken, I guess - but then I think you know that! Sympathy, for what it's worth. As someone who destroyed a graphics tablet by spilling an alcoholic beverage on it, I know that accidents happen and hindsight is 20:20. No practical advice, though, I'm afraid. (I back up three times, but not to a disc outside my machine - the hard drive to do that is waiting for me to use it, as we speak. I'd better do it!)
I recently had a similar problem when my disc went kaput and I had not backed up my data properly. I used a company called TRC Data recovery - it was not cheap at £300 to recover a 500GB disc but to me it was worth it (and a solid lesson!)
Their service was excellent and they spent some time talking me through the options.
I use external hard drives and I also back up images that are important to me onto DVD's. I've heard that the storage life of these and recordable Cd's are iffy but I've not found it to be the case.
I had a reason to go into a few of my archived Cd's from 2003 recently and they opened without any problems.
Quote: I've heard that the storage life of these and recordable Cd's are iffy but I've not found it to be the case.
All data storage systems should be regarded as iffy and libel to fail at any time. Best idea is to have 3 copies of everything, might save a lot of heartache one day.
I have mentioned this before on EPZ but I had a friend with a failed external drive which he dismantled and installed inside his pc and it ran ok...I suppose it depends where in the machine the failure occured so you either take a screwdriver or a cheque book to it...I cant see another option sadly...best of luck ...stuart
Quote: I have dozens of irreplaceable photos on an external hard drive. Last week the drive was knocked of my desk and now i can no longer access the drive. I,m very computer literate and have tried everything including data recovery software but to no avail, my only hope is a clean room where it can be stripped and hopefully get my photos loaded onto another drive. Can anyone help?
Anybody who is computer literate ALWAYS BACKS UP files, whether on DVDs or better and more usually an external hard drive. Personally I back up ALL myfiles daily on an external hard drive using Microsoft SyncToy backup (Free issue) and also monthly on DVD.
A valuable lesson to be learnt here I am afraid.
Frank
http://www.krollontrack.co.uk/ is a Company i'd recommend in Epsom, my company has used them - very good.
Their prices were said to be OK as long as you did not need the files next day - we did :-(
All drives will eventually fail - always back up to 2 or 3 different locations ideally with one of them in a different location entirely.
(That's not what I do as much as I should though)
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