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I'm always telling others to have backups and always be prepared for a pc crash. If only I had followed my own advice :mad:

Sorry to hear that. But you reminded me that I haven't backed up in quite a while.

*Cries for you*

Been there, done that. On my next pc I'm definitely buying two identical hard drives and setting up raid so the primary is cloned.

Good, maybe something good will come out of my pc's demise.

I can't even begin to describe what all I lost! Not only that but I have always relied on my account info to be remembered by my browser so, I have NO access to anything until I go through all the headaches of having account info reset.

Graphics, about 250 gigs. Old photos to be retouched, at least 200 gigs. Programs (registered) about 30 different programs I use for graphics, video editing, sound editing, and more.

Makes me want to throw up!

If it's important enough to you, there are places that will recover data.

So are you saying your HD crashed, rather than the PC ?

In that case, as Kevin states, if its imprtant enough, there are data recovery firms that can work wonders on so called crashed drives.

The hard drive is toast. It actually burnt the board that is visible on the underside of the hard drives case. After killing the power to the pc I could still detect the burnt electrical smell. I tried a usb hard drive adapter on two different lap tops. Neither of which could even detect the hard drive.

The pc was 9 years old. I should have known better that to trust that it would last much longer.

Well, I don't think that would stop them. They would hook up another controller board. But I guess it probably isn't inexpensive.

I'm taking it to town tomorrow to see if anything can be retrieved from it. If it's very expensive, I'll just take the loss. Spring is coming so maybe I'll just spend my time at the lake and not worry about it :)

Mmm...I don't know a lot about it, but if it's got burnt electronics it probably would need to be sent away somewhere. The lake idea is probably good.

Meanwhile, I'm going to go start that backup...

I upload my important photos ONLY to Drive, Dropbox etc... Videos upload to Youtube...

After doing a bunch of research online, I'm junking the possibility of any recovery. Live and learn. Thanks for the suggestions and ideas.

I had the same thing happen to me early last week, where my HD was basically just a humming hot plate inside the case. Giving off alot of heat, but no other action. And no longer even detected by the system.

Most everything though, I did have backed up. BUT, there was a major silver lining you should look into. It's a new day for drives.

Long story short, I took my PC tower to a computer repair shop owner friend of mine, and saw on his counter something I had been reading about but had forgotten - Solid State Hard Drives.

Sandisk 120GB SSHD - 60 bucks. I popped for it, had him install Windows XP Pro on it, and ain't looking back at all. (I will NEVER give up my XP Pro - they will have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.)

Quick review of the SSHD - wonderful. I have never seen a computer boot up this fast. It boots up completely and is ready to work, faster even than my monitors. But then after the bootup, it also operates greasy fast. Everything happens NOW with it... Everything runs blazingly fast, every program without exception. Even processor intensive ones like video editing and audio production, (Samplitude) run faster now.

Ya bring up Firefox? POP - it's there immediately with all tabs already loaded and ready to go in a eyeblink. How about Windows Media Player? BAM - there in less than a second with all your media already populated.

Because, the computer now doesn't have to "hunt" through the hard drive to find all the files it needs. I was able to back up my files and folders from the server I save everything on, in just a few minutes and we're talking ALOT of data.

There's no heat generated by this and it is immune to shock or vibration - so you don't even have to mount it, in your tower. (I did though, anyway) It's also of course, completely silent.

My only regret is I should have shopped online and got the bigger drive - they make these with capacity up to 2TB now - that's Terabytes.... I WILL do that, when my other HD takes a powder. It's a Western Digital 1TB drive that's only a couple of years old at this point. The one that locked up was about 8 years old.

So, take heart when your HD crashes - and yes eventually it will - and get yourself a SSHD to replace it. You'll be glad you did. Say goodbye to 7,200 RPM spinning platters - they're SO 20th Century...

I upgraded from windows xp to windows 7 long ago. If you guy haven't tried it you should.

I have 4 internal drives on my main pc and I have 2 externals, 1 is 5tb. I try to make image back ups to one of the internals every month and I have a program called Memeo that copies my files to my external.

When I upgrade I will also do the raid thing to have a couple drives mirrored. I wish there was a way to do it on an existing system but I believe it can only be done from the start when installing fresh.

Good luck OP. That is a nightmare. I have data going back to 1999. I would die if I lost all my data.