My hard disk died

This happened to me once with my USB. It had all my school work on it and I never backed up any copies to the school computers because I wouldn't be able to access them at home. Needless to say, disaster struck and I lost all my work on the USB and my assignments were due in the next week after that. Hate it when that happens and sorry for your loss bro.

Yeah I have had the same problem. The movies and pictures did not matter to me, though I still have not forgot since around 6 years ago, I lost my University major project. I was in tears, not that the grade of the project was all that great, though the work I put into researching, typing it up and so on, made me all more frustrated. It was some virus and trojans that infected the hard drive though those days are behind me.

It depends on how your hard drive died as to how difficult it is to recover the data.

Hopefully you only smashed your keyboard to pieces and left the hard drive intact!

Open the case side and start the PC with your finger on the hard drive case. If you can't feel a thing or the spin vibration is intermittent then the drive motor has gone and recovery is expensive - about £350/$700 to change the platters into a new drive chassis.

If the drive hums along happily then you should be able to read the data from it even if it won't boot. Purchase your new hard drive and install windows on it as normal. Move the jumper on your old drive from 'master' to 'slave' and connect it to the middle 40 pin ribbon connector and the end connector plugged into the new drive.

With luck you will see your old drive come up as E:\ or F:\ drive or some letter like that, depending on how many DVD/CDROMs and camera card reader drives you have.

You will then be able to recover your data though some programs may not work.

If your PC just doesn't start at all then your hard drive might be ok but it may be:-

1. The power supply unit has died - $20+ to replace
2. The RAM chip/s has died - $30+ to replace. DDR is much more expensive than DDR2 memory.
3. The motherboard has died - $50+ to replace
4. The processor has died. - $30+ and maybe tricky to source a new one on a 6 year old machime.

I faced a similar problem when my my daughter decided to clean the computer with some water. We were already in the shop ready to buy another computer when the technicians there managed to rescue all the information. Even the computer recovered once it was completely dry. I don't know how old is my hard dist but for sure more than 5 years and it is working well. Make sure that someone checks it well before you give up, may be some information can be recovered.

i never had a crash in my hard disk...i protect my system with two anti virus programs....so never had a chance of crashing ....

i have hitachi HDD 7 years passed but it still work so i dont know....

when's the burial? ...

just joking... lol

i have had it happened to me a lot of times already. but since my husband is the techy type and can make the dead thing come to life again, i sometimes not worry about it.

you know you can google search it on how to rescue a dead hard drive, they are tips on how you can save it, although it may be for just a while but at least you will have enough time to back-up everything you have there.

or better yet, take it to a computer technician, they may be able to do something else to get a copy of your files.

and next time, dont forget to burn a copy of all your files at least every month or twice a month... you'll never know what will happen next time.

I do backups of important files like photos periodically. I've got no hardware crashes yet but NTFS partition on my USB flash drive got broken once and I lose 95% complete documentation translation for an application of GNOME project. I was able to restore 37% of it and I had to do most of the work again.