in which a reader of this humble blog saves the day

   Y'ALL! MFA Mama reader Jessica, of Idol Analytics fame, SAVED ALL OF MY DATA FROM THE OLD LAPTOP! All of my music, all of my pictures...why, it's almost enough to make me kindly disposed toward Dell in restrospect! I mean, I had a dying old laptop with all of my data, and then I didn't have a laptop at all for a month, which sucked, but now--NOW? Now I have Das Uberlaptop, WITH all of my data on it, which beats the old dying laptop hands-down, and all it cost me was several small rage-strokes and a month of computer time. Which wasn't even that bad thanks to The Precious. So the morals of this story are 1) warranties are good to have, 2) Apple >>> Dell, and 3) everyone needs a Jessica.

   And how are all of YOU?

Comments

[Lala]

how did she manage that?

[MFA Mama]

I have no idea! I sent her the old hard drive instead of returning it directly to Dell and she worked some hoodoo witchcraft on it then sent it on its merry way!

[Kali]

Can she do Macs??

[MFA Mama]

I dunno, you'd have to ask her :)

[Jessicadennis]

Macs are my specialty; I recovered the data from the hdd with a Mac, in fact.

The drive was definitely failing but it wasn't all the way failed, so all I had to do was use a SATA to USB adapter, hook it up to my Mac, and copy the data over. It was making unhappy sounds, but never actually stopped working all the way (though it's not surprising Windows would be unhappy about booting off of it). I didn't have to use any advanced recovery software or use The Freezer Trick or anything.

The nice thing about Macs is that often you can avoid even needing to pull the hdd yourself; if you hold the T key as you start up a Mac, that will boot you into target disk mode. You can then use a Firewire cable to connect it to another Mac (or a PC that has software installed so it can read HFS+ disks) and copy over the data. Although for the Macbook Airs or other Macs that don't have Firewire ports, things get a little bit more complicated... particularly since with the Airs you can't pull the hdd anyway (not easily anyway, and you're *really* not supposed to do that yourself).

And sometimes if it's not a physical failure you can get yourself back to a working system with just DiskWarrior (DW is magical and wonderful and has saved some professors' lifework).

Oh and the other thing Mac users can do is call AppleCare and get help; I highly recommend buying the Applecare Protection Plan on all new Macs, since it gives you three years of free *actually helpful* phone support from them, plus three years hardware coverage. You can buy Applecare anytime within the first year of ownership, too, before the original warranty expires. It's a godsend for people who aren't super technically savvy.

Jeez I go on and on. Sorry about that. Stopping now.

[krlr]

I have *no* idea what Jessica was talking about but she appears be a GENIUS!