Four drives came across my bench last week. Every one of them held the only copy of something.

One stopped being recognized after a Windows update. One spins up and connects to nothing. One was bought two years ago and is still in its box. And one belongs to a business whose entire document set is sitting in a folder nobody has opened in years.

Back in July I wrote about backups and what recovery costs. This week is the other half of it. Not how to avoid this. What to do when you are already in it.

Five parts:

Monday. The Warning You Get. Drives almost never go without notice. Clicking, stalls that come back, files that open wrong, and the Windows message people click past for a month. SSDs are quieter about it and go faster.
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Tuesday. Not Recognized Does Not Mean Dead. Windows uses that sentence for about six different situations and only one of them is bad. Where to look safely, and why you should say no when it offers to format.
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Wednesday. The Case and the Drive Are Two Different Things. An external drive is two devices in one box, and the cheap one fails more often. Five minutes tells you which one quit, and it should happen before anyone quotes you a recovery.
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Thursday. What Not to Do. The eleven restarts. The repair that writes to a dying drive. The format button. The freezer. Most of what makes a recovery expensive happens after the drive fails.
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Friday. Getting It Off. What happens on the bench, why I image the drive before I look for your files, and how to tell an honest recovery quote from a guess.
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If your machine has been acting off, that is worth ten minutes now rather than a lab bill later. Bring it in.

-Mike
PCRescue!