![]() ![]() There’s always the chance of screwing up and accidentally reformatting the drive (still technically recoverable from, but much more difficult), or taking too long and letting the hard drive completely die. Still, when your data is at risk I can understand not dinking around and trying to do it yourself. Whether you boot off a CD/USB Drive, or you yank the hard drive and put it in an external enclosure (this is usually my preference), it’s not a particularly dangerous procedure. While the inner geek in me cringes at the thought of spending $99 to do simple data recovery, I can understand Mari’s decision here. I can’t complain too much because as long as there are computers I will have more work than I can handle, all thanks to people that don’t want to learn. If they are willing to listen or take notes, I am willing to explain it. When I work on repairing someone’s computer I always offer up the solution for them. This probably won’t be the last corrupted hard drive you have. If you must spend the money you should learn how to fix the problem. For a NetBook with a $300 price tag and you spend $65 (guess) for tech support. (Looking forward to your post Dave so I won’t mention anything else) Geek Squad or really any computer repair center isn’t cheap and we have all heard about the horror stories coming from there. Simple Google searches would have provided easy/painless steps to getting the files off. I have been working in tech support for over 7 years and it’s disappointing to see that people don’t want or unwilling to try things themselves. If being unwilling to continue endlessly attempting to recover data on my own makes me a failed geek, so be it. But if I should happen to falter in that resolution, it’s good to know the Geek Squad is right around the corner, and available to me every day of the week. Once I’m back up and running on my own computer, I have a firm resolution to get serious about data back-ups. For my two weeks without the Eee, I’ve managed to secure a temporary laptop ( thanks, Gretchen!), and I have access to all of my files. But my Eee PC is still under warranty, which means it will either get repaired (unlikely) or replaced. ![]() The sad part of this story is that a system recovery on my netbook only lasted a day before the machine when kaput again. ![]() Roughly five hours later, my data was ready. (Yes, the Geek Squad has its own OS.) He promised he’d have everything done by Tuesday, but after listening to me whine a bit, he also said he’d call if they finished the $99 process earlier. Gene from the Geek Squad quickly determined that he could recover my files booting up from a home-grown OS. Most computer places are closed on the weekends, but Best Buy is not. Given the hours of frustration inherent in the first option, I decided on the second. I could either play amateur IT specialist, trying to boot up the computer with an alternate OS loaded on to a disk, or I could call in the professionals. I had two options once I discovered I’d have to extract the data from my netbook. Before last week, it had been several months since I’d run a back-up, and I was panicked at the thought of losing the many files existing solely on my Eee PC. I have backed up in the past to one of our Western Digital external hard drives, but even with the help of the Clickfree back-up solution I picked up in January at CES (it runs a differential back-up every time you plug it in), I’ve never managed to get into a regular routine. (Tech support would not provide any advice on how I might accomplish such a back-up with no working operating system.)Īt this point you may be wondering whether I have ever considered backing up my data on a regular basis to avoid this type of disaster. A call to Asus tech support also confirmed that an F9 reset would wipe my files, and that I would need to get a full back-up before attempting the process. Miraculously I had the Windows XP recovery CD and an external CD/DVD drive on hand, but even after I figured out how to re-order the boot sequence, it became clear to me I would lose all of my data if I ran the recovery disk. I couldn’t even boot in safe mode, and every attempt to break away from the error screen resulted in a cycle that landed me right back where I started. My beloved Asus Eee 1000HA has served me well for eleven months, but last Friday everything changed when a system config error popped up my screen. No, here’s the moral of the story I like: when your computer dies on a weekend, it’s good to know the Geek Squad is around for data recovery. A resounding vote for cloud computing and distributed risk? How about, beware of irony and over-praising your gadgets? Or simply when it rains (first the washing machine breaks down, then the car…), it pours. There are so many lessons to take away from my recent experience in netbook hardware failure, it’s hard to know where to begin. ![]()
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