Electrical outage. Apocalypse follows.

[Zappo]

About 48 hours ago, the power company was doing some work in my area. When they powered up again, a surge completely destroyed my computer, despite the fact that it wasn't on at the time of the outage. I mean it. AC feed, motherboard, DVD burner, even the friggin' keyboard is toast. I'm not sure about the CPU, memory and PCI stuff, but only because I don't have anything to plug them into. Up to now, it looks like only the mouse survived. Legally, the company has no responsibility; the cause probably lies in my computer's AC feed, which must have been faulty. I can't otherwise explain such a disaster while nothing else in the house was affected.

Luckily, I kept copies of my important stuff on both hard disks, figuring the chance of both of them breaking down at the same moment to be fairly slim. Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened. I lost a couple of months of D&D-related work, a couple weeks of Ultima Online Planescape related work, and about twenty days of my university thesis, which must be completed by the end of January. That's only the important stuff; there were gigabytes of data which I can recover from backups or from the internet... with a few days of work. Days which, if I have to start redoing twenty days of thesis, will be rather hard to find.

So, I'm looking for a hard disk repair service. I don't have the foggiest idea of where you look for one; I've searched the internet and I've found a few in Italy. I'm also asking friends. But, for now, everything I found is terribly, terribly costly.

At this point, I'm willing to send the damaged disks overseas if I can find a relatively cheaper repair service in the USA. Which isn't too unlikely, with the current euro-dollar exchange rates.

Does any of you, by chance, know a reliable HD repair/data recovery service?

 

[Hand of Evil]

do not know of any but you may want to try making it a slave to your new system and try see if you can access the data.

You can also see if the local tech school may be able to do something for you.

 

[Wonko the Sane]

I work for the local electric utility. In the past, people who complained enough have been reimbursed for stuff just like this.

It may be worth looking into some more...

 

[Psionicist]

IBAS, there can be only one: http://www.it.ibas.com/

When they have fixed your hard disk there are a few things you can do so this won't happen again. Get yourself an UPS. I have an APC Back Back-Ups BR 800. Works flawlessly. While you're at it, don't ever buy cheap power supplies because when they die they often kill something else too.

But the most important thing is of course backups. Burning CD's and DVD's are highly annoying if you have more than 5 GB of data to backup. Personally I'll buy one of these puppies when they are released: http://store.westerndigital.com/product.asp?sku=2591445 Sexy.

Edit: IBAS is rediciously expensive _unless_ you explicitly tell them you are not a company/corporation.

 

[Vascant]

I have to agree with Psionicist on 2 two counts, the company posted does great work though we hired them as a company so the price was.. pricey. Also a UPS is a must, you don't have to even buy a big one just one to protect you. Between mother nature and the idiots at the power company, they have done their best to trash my PC yet.. UPS has been a rock

 

[Wonko the Sane]

the idiots at the power company

Easy, now...this sort of thing usually occurs with a poor ground connection, either at the service entrance or at the pole/pedestal the service connects to. Your local electric utility should check this out, otherwise an electrician can.

/starts crying at Vascant's hurtful remark again.

 

[Vascant]

Easy, now...this sort of thing usually occurs with a poor ground connection, either at the service entrance or at the pole/pedestal the service connects to. Your local electric utility should check this out, otherwise an electrician can.

/starts crying at Vascant's hurtful remark again.

Sorry, we have some real winners working at ours.

 

[Zappo]

Thanks for all the info. I've spent the afternoon working on the problem. The extent of the damage is unbelievable; everything that was connected to the box has been burnt save for the mouse, screen and network card. I won't seek damages from the electrical company; I think that the problem was at least partly in the AC feed (it wasn't particularly cheap, either!), and it is unlikely that I could get money from them. I'll check the grounding too and make sure it is properly connected.

Fortunately though, I have been able to fix one of the HDs myself; I've bought an identical one and swapped the controllers. It is now working well. It was the disk with the thesis. Yay!
It was not the disk with the D&D stuff.
The disk with the D&D stuff (and, actually, most everything else that I was working on) is a 40GB IBM DeskStar. Since I was able to fix the Maxtor, I'll try to fix this one too if I can find an identical one somewhere. If that doesn't work, I'll look into ibas, but seeing the damage I'm afraid that I won't be able to afford even a relatively cheap data recovery, because I'm going to have to buy a whole new computer.

About the UPS - I'll buy it now, but I never thought that an UPS was something that a home user would reasonably use. I did backups, but not every day or even every week. I'm not a business... I thought that destruction of both HDs was very unlikely (and maybe it is and I got real unlucky).

 

[Krieg]

The disk with the D&D stuff (and, actually, most everything else that I was working on) is a 40GB IBM DeskStar.

The point is probably moot now, but the DeskStars were a disaster for IBM, they had a failure rate several times higher than the industry average which IBM tried to cover up (gotta love uncovered internal eMails ). In the end the scandal was responsible for IBM selling off it's desktop storage division to Hitachi.

Avoid them at all costs.

 

[Wonko the Sane]

Oh yes...UPS's are a definite must. Smooths the power out very nicely, plus when my brother morons throw a switch in, you don't lose thesises (thesii?) and the like.