Laptop Question

[unforth]

So I accidentally sent my laptop to sleep while it was shutting down, and now it won't boot. According to the Vista support page, this is a known problem with Vista and the solution is to wipe the hard drive and reinstall. I'm more than willing to do this, but first I really, really want to get the data off. Some of it is backed up, a lot of it has been sent back and forth in e-mails and could be reconstructed, but I have files for work, pictures, music, and - to me most important - my current novel work in progress unbacked up. I know a few of you have had similar issues - what companies did you find that could get the data off? Have any of you used these recovery things? How did it go? Was it expensive?

Any help is vastly appreciated. The thought of losing almost 15k of work in progress brings tears to my eyes, not to mention all the other data - at least most of the rest is backed up...

Comments

[schenker28.livejournal.com]

That's such a bummer -- any luck yet? I had one more suggestion -- it's not so hard to recover the dad, usually, if you're willing to take out the hard drive from the laptop. I had to do this once and I bought a little $20 adapter so I could plug my extracted laptop drive into my other computer and suck the data across. Even if the OS doesn't boot, the data on the drive should still be easy to get to in this case.
Of course, you really want to get the computer working again, although if you can extract the data first, it's easy to do a fresh reinstall of Windows.
Also: yes, Vista sucks. It's really disappointing, since I'm actually a MSFT fan. At least they're moving up the schedule for the new version, which hopefully will be better.
And finally, I highly recommend you do more frequent backups! I didn't actually start doing that until last year, but now I'm much less stressed out about getting my laptop broken/stolen/etc. I don't back up everything, but if I have a work in progress I back it up after every work session -- I have it set up so it's only a mouse click or two and it's not a big deal. I back up to an external server where I host web pages, but you could also back up to your external drive and be fairly safe.