The 160GB hard drive on my five-year-old iMac G5 died a few days ago.
I’m not sure what happened. I’d like to blame Microsoft and I actually have some justification in doing it. For some reason, it froze in the middle of a Microsoft Office automatic update and it never recovered.
I’ve tried everything I can for free. I took it to the Apple Store on the Plaza…they couldn’t even see it. I bought a SATA to USB adapter on eBay that arrived today…it didn’t work either.
So I called a data recovery specialist. They told me that if they didn’t recover anything (which they assured me rarely happens), it would still cost me a $200 attempt fee, but if they did, it would be closer to $2,300! (They give you a range and the price is based on how much they recover – minimum $500, maximum $2,700.)
As much as I’d like to recover the data, I’m not down with dropping that much money. The only absolutely heart-breaking thing that I lost was a bunch of pictures. Fortunately, I moved many of the 10,000+ in my iPhoto library (especially the almost 2,000 from our Italy trip) to my Macbook and I’m thankful for that.
I’ll likely discover over time more of what’s missing, but what’s disheartening is that if I’d upgraded to Leopard I could have used Time Machine to automate the backups, but unfortunately I was still running Tiger.
If there’s one bright spot regarding the crash, it’s that the computer itself will still work and I can upgrade the drive to 320GB…twice the size of its predecessor. Still, it sucks.
so does it spin or even make noise?
so you can’t run data recovery because you can’t connect to it? maybe it a connector lead came loose?
That sucks, indeed. A couple years back I thought my PC hit the bricks, and it was the only thing all my files were on. Luckily, I just needed a new power supply and to remove about 3 inches of dust.
First thing I did with the new MacBook was dedicate one of my external hard drives for Time Machine.
sorry again brother. i’m going out and buying an external hard drive this week just in case anything like that ever happens.
Sorry to hear it dude. Hope nothing that you discover was to personal and irreplaceable.
I have had to tell a lot of clients that they lost everything. In the enterprise environment there are several options to prevent this, unfortunately most of the folks in this company won’t set aside the little but of time occasionally that it takes to make it work.
As for me, I save to an independent external drive that is left disconnected and turned off when not in use. I don’t back up near enough, but I DO do it when I add or change important documents.