By the way - one of the things that's been keeping me otherwise occupied in the last few days has been the complete drive death of our trusty old Compaq laptop. The hard disk has just utterly b0rked for  some reason - it won't boot, won't read, won't nuttin.

I've booted the machine under Knoppix (the amazing Linux client that boots from a CD and runs mostly in a ram disk) - it can see the drive, verify that it's still there and it's the right size, but can't find a file system of any sort to mount it.

So I tried the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (another highly-recommended free emergency boot disk, complete with a collection of outstanding utilities). Alas, still no joy. I can see the drive, verify that it has data on it, but not get close enough to actually be able to read anything useful from it.

Clearly, the thing is banjaxed beyond my limited powers of disaster recovery.

Can anyone recommend a good, dependable data recovery firm in the GTA? I've been half tempted to bring the laptop back in to Staples where we originally bought it, but I'm scared that they could end up doing more harm than good. The moment someone actually tries to write anything to this disk, it could all go even more pear shaped than it already is. I think it's time to call in the experts.

Tags: data recovery, Toronto, hard disk failure, Compaq, disk crash

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 17, 2006.
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