Hard Drive Crash--Help!!

[Elizabeth Walsh]

I was adding a second HD to a G4 tower and when trying to initialize it, the
original 10gb HD showed up "unreadable".  I have LOST all my customer's
data.  I checked with Drive Savers and they want $1500 to $2700 to recover it.
I had hoped to recover his data but can't begin to afford that kind of $$
I would greatly appreciate ANY ideas, suggestions, resources, help to
recover the HD.  (What about freezing it?)
Thanks, Elizabeth

[Larry Cronkite]

You have customers and you don't do regularly (daily) scheduled backups?

[Elizabeth Walsh]

It was HIS computer and he hadn't backed it up.  Of course I'm somewhat to blame
for not suggesting it, but I think its mostly the responsibility of the user to regularly
back up his data.

[Chris Waldrip]

Well, if his hard drive was only 10GB is size that means it was a VERY old hard drive (in computing terms). And was probably going to fail regardless of your presence.

The best I can suggest is Prosoft's Data Rescue II. If it can get to the drive it'll scan it for recognizable file types.

But at this point I wouldn't hold my breath.

[Larry Cronkite]

Not to belabor a point - but who was USING the computer when the drive went south?

[Elizabeth Walsh]

I was attaching a second hard drive to the bay.  I had the drive on top of the
G4 tower and screwing screws into the second drive and then I put the two drives
back in the bay and went to initialize the new one.  That's when the old one showed
up as "unreconizable".  I think there's blame to go around but he seems to think I did it.
I agree that it was most probably a coincidental end to a very old drive.  Do you think
that moving the drive out of the bay and putting it on top of the computer could have
crashed it? (the computer was off, of course).   Also, it was running OS9.  Which may
make a difference as to recovery software.

[Chris Waldrip]

I checked the user manual for Data Rescue (there's a demo version that will let you recover a single file under 500k, but it'll let you know if it's worth buying). It looks like the app can read HFS and HFS+ partitions. Here's part of the manual.

I've attached two pages from the manual that'll help you decide if it's worth while.

[Elizabeth Walsh]

Thanks Chris.  I own Prosoft and will try it when I get a few minutes.

Elizabeth