I am a looooooooser

*sigh*

The hard drive on my G4 iMac started clicking this afternoon, and of course I haven't backed it up in a while. The stupid thing is now dead, it can't find the hard drive on reboot. Thus, I have the following questions:

Who's a good person/company to retrieve the data that I stupidly failed to backup?
Where should I buy a replacement hard drive? Might as well get something bigger than my 80GB paperweight.

Thanks!

pidgeon92 said:

*sigh*

The hard drive on my G4 iMac started clicking this afternoon, and of course I haven't backed it up in a while. The stupid thing is now dead, it can't find the hard drive on reboot. Thus, I have the following questions:

Who's a good person/company to retrieve the data that I stupidly failed to backup?
Where should I buy a replacement hard drive? Might as well get something bigger than my 80GB paperweight.

Thanks!

Click to expand...

I don't know if you can (easily) replace the hard drive in an iMac. You should at least consider getting a new computer, as a hard drive dying is a warning sign of having a not-too-new computer.

Of course there will be ways of saving your Mac, I'm just saying that it probably won't be easy.

You can try some place like www.drivesavers.com, but it is not cheap to have your data recovered. There are others, and someone else may come along and mention them.

It is expensive to have data recovery done to you hard-drive. If those files are that important, then shop around for the best prices. Less likely to work, although more cost efficient is programs you can buy and try to recover data.

It is very expensive to send a drive to professionals to recover data.
Have not had to use it myself (yet), but personally, would invest in Disk Warrior before I considered sending it out.

I can't imagine how it would be possible for software to recover a drive with mechanical problems. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

True, If the hard drive has mechanically failed, the only solution is to have someone fix the mechanical problem or transfer the platter to a functioning drive to retrieve the data; which is expensive.

Always keep you data in 2 locations; like the internal drive or external drive. If you keep a lot of info on a external drive only, back that up on another drive also. It's annoying, but can save a lot of money and time in this kind of situation.

If you're brave and your iMac isn't under warranty, open it up and put the drive in your freezer for awhile- sometimes you'll get a little more time out of it, enough to back things up. This has worked for me. If not, try booting up with a Linux live CD and look for your hard drive, if it shows up at all, copy the data you want to a USB key or two.

pidgeon92 said:

*sigh*

The hard drive on my G4 iMac started clicking this afternoon, and of course I haven't backed it up in a while. The stupid thing is now dead, it can't find the hard drive on reboot. Thus, I have the following questions:

Who's a good person/company to retrieve the data that I stupidly failed to backup?
Where should I buy a replacement hard drive? Might as well get something bigger than my 80GB paperweight.

Thanks!

Click to expand...

In my experience (currently 3 imacs) any old drive I have had lying around has worked, some larger drives may act funny, for example only recognise a certain amount of the harddisk, if this is the case, just create partitions. Anything up to 127GB should be fine without additional partitions.