Powerbook HD died, any advice

[shazammy]

My beloved Powerbook G3 died over the weekend. I took it to my local Mac repair place (MacEnthusiasts in Los Angeles, great guys), and they told me that the hard drive has "gone bad". Whatever that means. It sounds like a bad child. At any rate, they said they can try and retrieve the data ($90 per hour - probably three hours), and then can transfer that to a new hard drive. A new hard drive will be $99 for a 40 gig (the G3 had a 12 gig, so that's good), and it will cost $135 to transfer the date to the new HD.

So...any advice? I do need the data, and am not sure what the best route is.

Thanks,

Kevin

 

[pncc]

My beloved Powerbook G3 died over the weekend. I took it to my local Mac repair place (MacEnthusiasts in Los Angeles, great guys), and they told me that the hard drive has "gone bad". Whatever that means. It sounds like a bad child. At any rate, they said they can try and retrieve the data ($90 per hour - probably three hours), and then can transfer that to a new hard drive. A new hard drive will be $99 for a 40 gig (the G3 had a 12 gig, so that's good), and it will cost $135 to transfer the date to the new HD.

So...any advice? I do need the data, and am not sure what the best route is.

Thanks,

Kevin

FYI,
Just how bad do you need the data? Depending on what 'killed' your hard drive, fussing with it may actually do more harm than good. DriveSavers in California WILL (?99% success rate) be able to retrieve the data but it will be expensive–on the order of $1000. This other outfit doesn't have the capabilities that Drivesavers has and may make the data irretrievable by DriveSavers if they fail.

 

[Mechcozmo]

Does the hard drive work AT ALL?

If you can startup from a CD, then you might be able to burn CDs of your important data.
Actually, second thought: a FireWire hard drive would be the best bet. Much easier to install OS X onto, easier to copy important stuff to. Or OS 9.

If the drive still spins at least, there is a chance...

And if your data is important, DriveSavers will get it. But if another company gets to it first you are screwed.

 

[California]

And it wasn't your powerbook that died. It was only the hard drive. Make sure you replace it with a 7200 rpm 40 gig. Other PB HDs are too slow. Get a Travelstar by Hitachi. Quiet, fast, great drive. Up the ram while you are at it since you love your G3 PB.

 

[maya]

time for an hardware upgrade.

If the drives only problem is not mounting then you can try to rescue it since there are 3rd party apps that can access the directory tree of the HDD and try to recover as much data as possible. No company can guarantee a 99% data retrieval success since they do not know off hand how bad the failure is. What if they only recover 20% of it and advertise 99% that sounds like shoddy advertising.

It all depends on how important the data is too you in the end.

 

[Mechcozmo]

What if they only recover 20% of it and advertise 99% that sounds like shoddy advertising.

You can always what-if... but Drive Savers is reportedly been able to save nearly everything off of the disks they get. Sometimes it is everything.

And hardware upgrade is right! I'd say the 7200rpm isn't a bad idea. 5200rpm isn't bad either, but you really should go with the faster drive to speed your computer up a tad bit.