OT sort of. Fried my laptop.

[coastgirl]

It had to happen, I guess.

Tea. In the keyboard.

Then sparks and smoke. It's now outside on a deck chair, upsidedown.

Not good. My son heard me use a bad word. Twice.

We have been talking about replacing it, but there is a TON of stuff resident on it, including my car rental spreadsheet, my ADR spreadsheet, etc. etc. (Pretty type A for a cavalier tea drinker, eh?)
Dh thinks the hard drive will be recoverable, but it's gonna slow me down for a few days.

And I think my new one, when it gets here, will have to wear the Plastic Bib of Shame.

 

[Ham Ham]

Is your data backed up?

If not the hard drive still might be OK.

Bummer.

 

[msmayor]

The very first thing you should do when you replace it is get yourself an external hard drive.

EVERY important file that may be resident on our laptop or our desktop is also saved to the External. All our photographs are on the external. Its saves tons of grief if something happens.

I've had to re-load the operating system on our laptop a couple of times, and there's never any worry about wiping the hard drive clean because I know I have all the important stuff saved externally.

 

[coastgirl]

Of course my data is not backed up.

Looking for a good repair place to take it to, just to get the stuff off.

 

[AndyMcV]

Looking for a good repair place to take it to, just to get the stuff off.

Just a thought... the same thing happened to me and I took my laptop into my work and my IT group pulled the harddrive out and was able to get the data off. Good bunch of guys I work with. Saved be a bunch of $$ too. Maybe you can do something simular.

 

[Minder]

Backing up your data is a great step for easy recovery. If you have priceless things like pictures and memories, you always want 2 coppies, because something will often go wrong, but seldom will 2 different backups (On different hardware) go bad at the same time.

Having said that, All is not lost.

Your hard drive is a fairly tight unit, and as long as the sparks didnt fry it, you should still be able to recover the data. This goes for Operating system crashes also.

Go to your local computer store and ask for an external hard drive conversion kit. This should cost between $10 and $40 depending on the manufacturer and your local store.

This kit consists of a hard case, a face that plugs on to your internal hard drive, and a USB cable.

Take your internal hard drive out of your laptop, plug the conversion face on to it, slide it into the hard case and secure it with the screw provided.

Now plug it into the USB socket of any other computer and it becomes an external hard drive like any other. The difference is, it wont try to boot the operating system because the other computer allready has its OS installed and running. In 95% of cases you should be able to access your data.

I suggest at this point, you copy off what you want, format your new drive to remove all the stuff you dont need, and then use this drive as your new external backup system.

 

[coastgirl]

I suggest at this point, you copy off what you want, format your new drive to remove all the stuff you dont need, and then use this drive as your new external backup system.

That sounds like a great idea, and gives us some use for the old bits. Thanks.

 

[coastgirl]

Just following up to say, my drive is rescued if not my laptop. Dh took it to a computer shop today, they checked it out and popped it into a case, and charged him less than Best Buy or Future Shop wanted just to sell us the equipment. Now that's service!

Now I can get all my vacation spreadsheets back!!

Thanks for the commiseration and the good advice.

 

[c&m]

That is GREAT news! I was crossing my fingers for you -- losing all your stuff would be tragic. Thanks for the subtle reminder to me that it's time for a backup.

 

[Ham Ham]

Excellent news you were able to recover your files.

Those of you who don't have one please get an external drive to back up your data.
http://compnetworking.about.com/od/homenetworking/a/networkbackup.htm

 

[coastgirl]

Oh...I just saw the irony in my sig...I picked the drinking coffee (tea) at the computer icon to represent myself, as I spend a lot of time reading, posting, and relaxing...but there doesn't seem to be a variation on it of dumping the cup of hot liquid into the keyboard...

 

[Sue M]

Just following up to say, my drive is rescued if not my laptop. Dh took it to a computer shop today, they checked it out and popped it into a case, and charged him less than Best Buy or Future Shop wanted just to sell us the equipment. Now that's service!

Now I can get all my vacation spreadsheets back!!

Thanks for the commiseration and the good advice.

Good work! Invest in that external hard drive back up thingy. I have so many photos downloaded to my laptop, I'd die if I lost them. So I back up
Bib of shame