The other day, I got a call from a friend saying that his computer was running very, very slowly after he gave it a cleaning, and he was sure it was the video card because it took a long time for the icons to come up.
Well, this doctor thought it was a hard drive problem, and after paying a house call and doing some troubleshooting on a quirky motherboard, found out it was REAL hard drive trouble, as in “Start looking for the bugler to play Taps” kind of trouble.
Did he backup? Of course, to the soon-to-be deceased drive.
I’ve dealt with dead drives before, but this failure is new to me in that this one isn’t quite dead yet. The drive has three logical drives, and you can access and even copy files (though very slowly) from the first and some of the third drive, but not the second.
I took the drive home and started getting ready to do diagnostics, but when I held the drive in my hands and turned on the machine, I felt an occasional, quiet, clunking sensation on one side of the drive. That combined with the high-value data on the drive quite effectively discouraged me from any further efforts.
This looks like a job for the “take it apart” data retrieval folks. Yes, I could go looking around and find out enough to try to do it myself, but this is not exactly a good opportunity to learn by doing.
So I ask: Does anybody have personal experience using such folks, and would they recommend any particular place, especially one in or around New York City? If you do (and/or have any general words of wisdom about this), could you drop me a note?
I thank you and he thanks you for any suggestions.
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