Last Thursday I was watching a really bad spanish movie on my computer when it just died. No power up, so I though that it was a problem with the power suply or the motherboard. It was a really old computer: 1998. I upgraded it twice, with a new hd and later, two years ago with an old motherboard/micro that my friend Luis Mago gave me. So it was a good time to buy a new desktop computer. On Friday I went to verkkokauppa, a computer store very close to Nokia NCR in Helsinki, with moi. So on Saturday morning I set up my new computer, with a very big surprise: my old hard disk was also dead. Only a little bit of noise on power on, and nothing, no more. Everything lost: my music, my documents, my writtings, my pictures… 8 years of stuff. It is a big coincidence, because some days ago Jesus warned me about hard disk failures, so I bought a dvd writer for doing backups. But I got this lumbago pain so I delayed the dvdrw instalation a few days…and then it died! 🙁
The instalation of the new machine was funny, I got a asus motherboard with the JMB363 SATA chipset. None of my on-cd distros (thanks Novell for the SuSE boxes) recognized this chipset, and the DVD drive was not functional. I googled a bit, and I needed some brand-new kernel to make it work with the all-generic-ide param. No luck. I tried Fedora Core 6test2 with a pretty kernel panic. I need to hack a little bit to get a Fedora rawhide 2.6.17-1.2586 kernel booting on my machine and inside a bootable CD. After that I tried to do a network installation. FTP failed a lot, so I finally got the minimal installation with HTTP.
Now it’s time to try to recover all my data from the dead hd. So, lazy web:
Do you have any experience with data recovering companies?
It’s a 120 GiB HD with 7 ext3 partitions. Something giving me the full data on DVDs and not very expensive would be great. If you can recommend me any company it would be great.Thanks!