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OT: Laptop drive recovery
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Right, my Dell laptop hard disk has just gone "phut". I can boot into the
diagnostics partition, and it looks like there are several dozen
unrecoverable sectors on the boot partition.
Good new: It's under warranty and a new drive is arriving tomorrow.
off, so I need to get the data off if possible in the next 24 hours. This
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Sure, I'm perfectly happy to send it back to them, but I think it's
reasonable that I be given an opportunity to salvage anything I can from it
first.
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means I don't have time to get a drive enclosure and plug it into another
machine, so I'm going to have to recover what I can from the laptop.
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Are you sure? When I bought my BFO monitorI needed a replacement after
a short while as the card reader didn't work properly. I ended up with
a 48" wide screen for a week as "it's standard Dell policy to deliver
the replacement before asking for the original back". The chap
specifically said that it was with swapping computer (bits) so that
anything could be copied from the old one to the new one.
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Can anyone recommend something straightforward to recover/transfer the files
I can get at? I used to use OnTrack Data Recovery back when it was on a
floppy disk, but no floppy drive on this laptop! I've got SpinRite here, but
that reckons about 100 days to finish analysis!
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Normally you pay a couple of quid extra at the point of purchase of your
laptop to have the "keep my hard drive" option.
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Hmm, never saw that anywhere.
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We do this as a matter of course on the company machines because some of
them are used by our military section and there's sensitive stuff on them.
However, in the past this was'nt the case and we found that if you bleated
to Dell enough they'd sigh and let you keep the old one. This bleating has
to be done with Dell NOT with the courier or engineer who brings the
replacement!
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Oh sure, not the couriers problem is it.
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I guess the reason they ask for the drives back is so they can make a
further warranty claim with their suppliers.
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Makes sense.
Still, nobody has given me any ideas for what t use to recover the data!
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try making a copy of the drive using ghost or acronis (I've not used acronis
for images but I have used their drive resizing tools and they seemed good)
Anyway they appear to have a 15 day free trial version
that may do the job.
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Speak to Odie at this firm. He can advise best course of action better than
just about anyone.
Whether you need advice on if you can recover it yourself or get him to do
it if the data is of real value, he is the man on this.
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Seconded, Duncan (odie) is a top bloke.
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Well there's nothing critical on there that hasn't already been dumped to a
file server, so were defnitely dealing with more of an "inconvenience"
factor, as opposed to a "must recover it at any cost".
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You might want to try downloading the Ultimate Boot CD Image as there are a
lot of v.useful file recovery tools on that.
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Ooh, ta. Will give it a go.
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If you need to hold on to the drive for a little while to give yourself more
time, you can do:
a) Contact Dell again and ask for the drive to left onsite. The visiting
Tech/courier will be given a card Pt # D4263 to prove authorisation.
b) Ask the visiting dell rep that you want to keep the drive for a short
while. He will have to call Dell Tech Support and ask for an ENG ref no.
then he can leave the drive and Dell will contact you around 5 working days
later to arrange collection.
I would out of preference, and it may be easier for you at this point, to
contact Dell in respect of a) above.
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Ah, well if I'd known that at the time I would have asked for that. Instead,
I went to their online chat thing earlier and got the 5 working days
extension, which to be honest should be enough time for me to a) pull off
anything I need, and b) zero the rest of the drive :-)
If I run out of time, I'll just ask them for another 5 days!!
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They'll call asking if it's available for collection, just tell them you
want longer.
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I do this every day for Dell as I'm one of the visiting techs. Are you in
East Anglia? coz it might be me that comes! ;o/
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Getdataback has worked for me in the past.
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Try some of these suggestions, gleaned from news.grc.com:
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The failed dive has personal private, confidential information on it,
doesn't it
Tell them they can't have it
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just go and buy a drive and send the old one back when get around to
it, then ebay or keep as spare.
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