Everything I've worked on since May 2007, done for. =(

[mouthuvmine]

I recently (about a month and a half ago) got my laptop back from Best Buy's service center for warranty-covered work, and it was almost better than the day I bought it. Skip ahead about a month, I have these awesome little artifacts appearing and dancing all over my desktop. I restart. Now I get the confetti right at the XP welcome screen, and it freezes before the desktop loads. Back to Best Buy. Now, two weeks later they call to let me know that my hard drive is dead, and they already sent it to the center again for replacement. If would like them to TRY to recover my data it'll run me $85. To TRY. If it's too far gone, my $85 is as well. Now, I had all of my game stuff (a couple designs, a TON of graphics, etc) backed up on a USB key, but my brother needed to use it for some reason I can no longer recall, and I just never resaved the data.

Wow. The only reason I'm pissed instead of just a little depressed is because there's not even an evil person or group to be upset with. It's not my fault (the data loss is, but not everything), it's not my brother's fault, Best Buy, or even HP. It's been almost three years, and I really used the hell out of it.

I don't know what I expect to come from this, but I'm solo in the apartment right now, and I've got to tell SOMEBODY.

[magintz]

Damn dude. I've been there and done it all although never lost quite as much as three years worth of work. In fact I have now lost the same AGS game I've been working on a total of two times. Well the second time I copied the backup onto the original so I basically reverted 3 months work. It's what keeps putting me off from working on it.

Now I have copies on my USB key, stored on two separate hard drives and every once in a while I'll leave a copy on the web. The thing I'm always most worried about losing are my photos so I try to put all of those on CDs.

I haven't used it but for anyone else who is worried about the same problem:
http://lifehacker.com/147855/geek-to-live--automatically-back-up-your-hard-drive

A little tutorial for automatically backing stuff up to the internet.

[Oliwerko]

That's why I have two same-sized drives in my PC and keep everything double.

[Chicky]

'I told you so' isn't going to help him guys!

If you can get the hard drive back from best buy (which you should be able to, it's your hard drive!) there's a good chance you'll be able to get the data back yourself. Something's probably corrupt or lost on the hard drive, I'm no IT expert but if you have errors in the boot sector all sorts problems can occur. The good thing is that if you can hook up the hard drive to another computer (you can use a SATA convertor to rig it up to a desktop) and you should be able to see the files on the hard drive through one of the many data recovery programs out there.

You could also try making a DOS boot disk with something like FINDNTFS (http://www.partitionsupport.com/utilities.htm) and accessing your files through that.

Like i said i'm no expert but in theory the data should still be magnetically stored on the disk, it just seems like the part that tells your computer how to start is knackered! Maybe someone else can elaborate a bit on this, i wouldn't recommend going head first into it because there is a good chance you could make things worse.

[arj0n]

Like Chicky said, when I've got into problems with a harddisk, I always connect the 'bad' harddisk into an other PC.
Just unhooking the cd-rom player and connect the bad harddisk with it's cables.
It's really one of the easiest ways.
If that doesn't work, you can indeed use a SATA convertor.
A friend of mine has a cable he connects to the USB port and at the other end of it you can click any harddisk.
A perfect solution. I'd really like to have one for myself.
Then, mostly, I can recover what needed. Have always worked for me.
OK, one thing is that your warranty isn't covered anymore.
But saving data for me is more important than having the warranty still covered.

[Nacho]

My condolences... But, even knowing that YOU are not able to see it this way NOW, I am sure that you' ll come with something even better than the original work... ^_^ Anyway, you have my sympathy for what happened.

[mouthuvmine]

Hey, thanks guys. Yeah, the thing with Best Buy is that I, by luck only, brought in on the second to last day of the warranty, so if I take it back they won't fix it. I'm going to see if I can get the dead drive back and try to recover some stuff myself, but honestly the shock was worse than the situation itself. Sort of how Nacho said, I've been wanting to redo a lot of my art. The worst will be rewriting certain things, but life goes on.

That sucks about losing the same game two times. I freak out when I don't save all my changes on something big like a BG, or last night I Effed up and saved 2 frames of animation as .jpg. You must be a patient person. =)

[magintz]

It's nice that people post things like this as for those who have never had any real problems like this can hopefully learn from others disasters.

[m0ds]

I hear ya, PC problems are a bitch. I had my netbook for 2 weeks before it died beyond repair. 200 hundred quid down the drain. And today I destroyed my latest games editor.dat file, and that is just hell boiling over. For me, 2 very depressing happenings...but...you'll find a way

[InCreator]

Well, here's a perfectionist's prayer to you:

"That old stuff was amateurish, stupid and shame to show to anyone. When you made this, you were only practicing.

You might have lost it, but none of the skills you acquired while making it.
You have those skills right now.

You will make new stuff, way better than any of this old crap was, and be proud.
And rock.

Amen"

[Mr Flibble]

If you DO get it back, put it in an airtight bag and freeze it for several hours (obviously after having removed it from the laptop).

I've read on forums about people who swear by this.

http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/01/freeze-your-hard-drive-to-recover-data.html

[mouthuvmine]

This is a super bump, and I'm sure everyone was just dying to find out how this turned out (smirk), so here's the goods...

I've been on my 4th stretch of my laptop being at the Bestbuy service center, the 3rd since I started this thread, and they're finally tired of dumping money into the computer. I'm typing this on my brand -frickin'- new Asus G72. This thing is a BEAST. I forget the processor speed right now, but I'm running 6GB of Ram, and a Geforce GTX 260m with 1GB onboard. And it honestly feels like I'm driving an Aston Martin.

I'm back, baby!

[blueskirt]

Nice computer! Sorry to hear for your data loss, that crap happened to me often.

Strange thread revival coincidence, my hard drive died a week ago, it ran 24 hours a day for the last 3½ years and went through an exploding power supply, I got my PC back yesterday. I was lucky as just before the hard drive died I managed to boot in safe mode and copy all my stuff on my external hard drives, and right after that the computer refused to boot in safe mode too. Not that it would have been a big loss since every 2 weeks I back up all my stuff while reading a comic. External HDs are easily the best thing I bought in the last couple years.