You know the drill – someone calls you in a panic because their computer won’t reboot. You ask if they’ve been experiencing problems recently. And they go on to tell you how the computer had been crashing more frequently of late, and that sometimes they have to reboot it several times, etc, etc, etc!

I had a neighbor who stopped me and said “You’re the computer guy, aren’t you?”. Long story short, his computer had been acting up and finally would not boot. He had two different people/places take a look at the drive and declared that the drive was dead and the data was not recoverable. One of those people said that he had a vast array of expensive tools at his disposal, and could not do anything with the drive.

I asked if I could take a look at it. I brought the drive back to my workbench, hooked it up to a computer, and ran my trusty GetDataBack utility from Runtime Software. Sure, it took 4 hours to run, but once it did, it located over 800 documents, photos and music files!

Don’t let the $79 price scare you away. Unlike a lot of software, this is a one time $79 price with free lifetime updates! If you’re an I.T. technician, you should have this in your I,.T. toolkit!

Yes, I have also heard of the trick of putting the drive in a sealed air-tight bag and put it in the freezer for 15 minutes. I’ve tried that several times, without success.

Finally, my good MVP buddy Mick from Down Under suggested looking at some of the freeware offered by MiniTool. I’ll write more about those in another blog post.