[trinko]

A powerbook was bumped against a chair. When it was next used i get grinding sounds and no boot disk. Using DiskWarrior, System Works, and Tech Tool Pro I didn't see any harddrive--actualy disk warrior showed a weird non-alphebetical drive name in addition to the CD but it said it didn't support SMART.

I called up a couple of drive recover shops which said typical costs--which they will give you a better estimate on for free when you send in the drive but i was looking for a quick ballpark--range from 400-2700. since this is personal data, not business stuff, that is a bit much.

so my questions are:

1) Does a head crash cause the HD to disappear from tools like tech tool pro?
2) Has anyone else had their hard drive recovered and if so lessons/recommendations please.
3) When I ran System Works disk editor it showed an ATAPI drive at 0,0 which I assume is the CD. It also showed 3 disk images. Anyone know what these are and what the address of the interal HD and CD are for a 15" 400MHz Titanium Powerbook?

Thanks for any and all help

[bighead]

1. Yes, if the drive is physically failing, it is likely that software won't see it. Continuing to run the drive will likely cause it harm and complicate recovery.
2. Shut your computer off and don't power on the hard disk until you hand it over to a recovery company.
3. I don't recall.

OnTrack is about 30 miles north of me in Fountain Valley, and I've had several people take dead drives there and successfully get the data back. I'd count on spending around $2000, higher or lower depending on the actual nature of the failure. Your price quotes sound reasonable, if not a bit on the low side.

[trinko]

Thanks! Unless I get further advice I'm going to pull the drive, install a new one, and see if my wife, it's her computer, can survive. To avoid future problems I ordered her an external firewire drive so she can just backup the whole internal drive. The price is too high unless my wife decides she has to get her old emails back.