Hard disk failure

[Freddie Reppond]

Has anybody had experience with a hard disk failure?

I have a Sony Vaio, two weeks old.  The message I got when I booted it up this morning was something alone the lines of "hard disk failure. May take more than an hour to repair."  Then I got a moving icon for a few minutes and then it went away, never to reappear.  No little grinding noises issuing from the laptop.  After half an hour, I shut it down manually and then rebooted and got nothing.  Just a blank screen.  So it seems to be dead.

I bought it from Best Buy and it's still under warranty and I have the extended warranty for good measure.  

I will be waiting at the door when they open this morning and will see what Geek Squad can do.

Unfortunately, I do have a major chunk of work that was not saved on an external drive.  It's a transcription job from audio, which I do have.  It just means I lost a lot of hours of work that I now have to repeat.

I don't know that I'm asking for anything here on this forum except maybe some insight on whether I can expect to recover any of my work from the disk and in what form it might be.

[Kelli Combs (admin)]

That is awful that this happened to you.  I've never had this experience (knock on wood.)  Do you perhaps use a scopist that would have your transcript that was at least scoped?  

I realize you lost the file when it crashed and you probably don't want to hear that you should back it up on a thumb drive after you've gone through the job or you're halfway through it.   Anyways, that's what I do.  That way, you at least have it backed up on your thumb drive and can load it on another computer.  You can never be too careful with computers because they can crash at any time. 

Hopefully the Geek Squad can retrieve your files for you.  When I was getting the blue screen of death on my Toshiba a few years ago, the Geek Squad told me they couldn't get any of my files.  Not sure how hard they tried, though.

[Janiece Young]

I had this happen to me one time.  I know this does not help you today, but after that happened to me I got serious religion about backing up to a flash drive things that are in the editing process.

I hope you can get it back.

Good luck,

Janiece

[Carol A.]

Hi Freddie, I feel your pain!  This happened to me years ago on a big desktop I used to have, a Sony also.  The Geek Squad was great and they saved all my work!  I'll never forget it.  His name was Michael, and I called him My Angel.  He saved my work and all my photographs, too!  I do hope it works out for you.  Good luck and let us know how you make out.

[Judy]

Freddie,  Did you know you can back up Eclipse to Dropbox?  You should see Christy Russell-Fagan's instructions to (her words) "redirect your Eclipse jobs and dictionaries through Dropbox so you have an automatic backup and you're working from the current version of a transcript no matter which computer you want to work on." 

The instructions are over on the Total Eclipse Facebook Group. 

I've set up my system so I bring a netbook (trying to lighten my load) to my jobs but edit on a desktop with a 22" screen at home. Everything is constantly updated to Dropbox so I have EVERYTHING on both computers at all times, even new dictionary entries.

[Judy]

Sorry to hear that.  But I guess the good news is that there's only two weeks of lost work, right?  I mean, you still have your dictionary and other files on your old computer??

 

[Janiece Young]

Sorry, Freddie.  I've been there too.

Hang in there.  If it helps, it is easier to edit them the second time around.

[Rosalie DeLeonardis]

When I bought my Dell, my hard drive crashed two weeks later.  Had all jobs backed up except one small one.  Took it to Best Buy to do recovery, but they couldn't.  Dell repairman came to my home and removed the hard drive and replaced with new one.  I had to send the hard drive to one of these specialty companies who can recover things from being in a fire to being in the deep sea, but anyways, it cost me $2,400 to recover a $300 job.  Lesson learned for me to always back up every job before every shutting down when done with a depo. Even though I fought with Dell, I ended up getting a brand new laptop, but I was so scared even when editing my jobs that I would backup what I had edited on to my external drive just in case.

 

[Judy]

Rosalie, you didn't have the notes on your writer? 

[Rosalie DeLeonardis]

No.  I have a Stentura 8000 from 1994 and my disk drive went out in 2008, and even though I still use paper, when I had it serviced when the drive went out, the man adjusted the key stroke where it cuts off the bottom half of the letters and I haven't fixed it, one because I like the feel of it, and two I can't find the little screw driver that came with it. 

[Ann Medis]

Freddie, this might be moot at this point, but you can get all of your work off of the dead laptop.   I have had this happen to me twice, once with a Sony and once with a Fujitsu, and both times I was able to have copied onto CD my entire C drive.  I would bet Best Buy has this capability since they repair computers, but any computer repair company or person will be able to accomplish this.  It requires having the equipment, but if the company can look at your hard drive, they will be able to copy it for you.  The first time I paid $50, and the second time I paid $100.  Best Buy should not charge you at all for this. 

Good luck.  Hope this doesn't reach you too late. 

[Rosalie DeLeonardis]

Also, too, Freddie, it would depend on how corrupted your hard drive is.  I did pay Best Buy the $100 for them to try and recover, but because it was so badly corrupted they couldn't, and did reimburse me my money.

[Ann Medis]

Freddie, I happy you didn't lose too much, but still....

Lenovo has been wonderful to work on.  Wonderful.   I'm on Eclipse.  I purchased this Lenovo through eVerbatim.   Yes, it costs more, but I believe the vendor looks for the best laptops to work with the requirements of their software.   Best Buy does not do that.   The Sony I had I purchased at Best Buy.  Problems from the get-go because it was not the right machine for the job.  Sony is wonderful and I don't mean to say they are not.  Just not the model of laptop for the software I was using.  Bought an IBM from Eclipse and it's still going and is my backup, as a matter of fact.   Fuji was my fault.  As it turns out, Fuji keyboards don't like coffee spilled on them three times.