So your hard drive failed, now what?
By Melissa Yee
Sooner or later all hard drives are going to die. It’s just a matter of when. Maybe you’ll be lucky and get a few warning signs. Your computer freezes often, the cursor is unmovable, and keyboard shortcuts are unresponsive. The only way to recover is a forced shutdown. Or maybe you hear strange grinding noises or your data is suddenly disappearing. So when the time comes, hopefully you’ve backed up your data. For those who haven’t, which is very common, you’ve gotten yourself in a sticky situation. Once it does fail, you’ll be running around like a maniac. In despair, you’ll be trying to find anyway to recover your data. I have faced a similar situation to this.
My computer could not find my operating system and would not start up. I quickly asked all my techie friends on advice on what to do. They told me to try to reload the operating system. Attempted too but nothing happened. They all came to the same conclusion, there’s something wrong with my hard drive. And once again, I was faced with the possibility of losing all my data. No longer a student with the option of the cheap school computer store, the only place I knew of was the Geek Squad at Best Buy. I explained my situation to the Agent and he gave me a run down on what my choices were. In my moment of despair, I couldn’t grasp anything he told me. It was like being in a Charlie Brown episode and all I heard was "mwa mwa mwa mwa." There was something about a diagnostic fee, then a service fee, then data extraction fee, buying insurance, and if my computer needed hardware fixing they would have to send my computer out to a repair depot. All I got from that was it would cost me around $300-500 to fix everything and up to 3 days to 2 weeks to fix; all depending on what the problem was.
Again, I lucked out. My hard drive did not die. It had a few unwanted viruses that made it crash. The Geek Squad cleaned out my computer for a charge of $70/80. That was lucky, right? On top of that, it took them about 3 days. So let you be warned now, data recovery is not cheap and can cost about $300. Not only does it cost a finger and a leg, but it can take a few days to weeks. Not to mention, data recovery is not always 100 percent. So for those of you who are fortunate to get your data back, the money and time spent could be worth it.
You know what to do now, BACK UP YOUR DATA!