So I was in the process of reinstalling Vista on another machine this morning, I keep all of my digital photos from the last 6+ years on that machine along with a backup on an external hard drive, both are synced every day.
I then wiped the drives in the machine, reinstalled Vista and then plugged in the external hard drive to sync them all back, unfortunately a big plume of smoke came out of the HDD controller in the external drive so I unplugged it quickly, it appears whatever happened to the controller also must have killed the drive too, I then dismantled the HDD case, took the drive out (it's a SATA drive) and attempted to plug it in to the spare machine, unfortunately it won't boot with the power cable plugged into the drive so I think I might have lost 1000's of photos of my son from birth -> now, all my wedding and honeymoon photos and 6 years worth of memories
Gutted is an understatement.
Clutching at straws here but does anyone know if there's any way (short of paying an extornionate amount of money to a data recovery company which is an absolute last resort) I can get the data off this drive?
Thanks
I then wiped the drives in the machine, reinstalled Vista and then plugged in the external hard drive to sync them all back, unfortunately a big plume of smoke came out of the HDD controller in the external drive so I unplugged it quickly, it appears whatever happened to the controller also must have killed the drive too, I then dismantled the HDD case, took the drive out (it's a SATA drive) and attempted to plug it in to the spare machine, unfortunately it won't boot with the power cable plugged into the drive so I think I might have lost 1000's of photos of my son from birth -> now, all my wedding and honeymoon photos and 6 years worth of memories
Gutted is an understatement.
Clutching at straws here but does anyone know if there's any way (short of paying an extornionate amount of money to a data recovery company which is an absolute last resort) I can get the data off this drive?
Thanks
