computer woes, continued: defeated by screws

[ratcreature]

In the last installment my beloved laptop died, not recognizing its hard disk any longer, without the option to rescue anything from a Live CD, as its DVD drive had died a while ago.

Anyway, in an attempt to maybe salvage some of the lost data (my first HD failure since 1998, I've been complacent about frequent backups) I got myself an SATA/IDE to USB converter thingy, hoping to plug that into the disk, and then follow a data recovery guide, which explains how to image a damaged disk (I also got a shiny new external hard disk with plenty of space so I can store it) to then do repair work on that image and hopefully salvage stuff.

However, before I even got to that stage I've been defeated by screws. I got the disk out of the laptop okay, but it is in a metal frame you slide in, and the cable of the converter does not fit onto the disk while it is in the metal thing. But I can't get the screws loose. They don't budge at all, the only effect I'm having is denting my screw driver head. Admittedly said tool is a cheap and dingy little thing (I got it with some computer part or other), but I suspect if the screw driver was harder I'd only end up damaging the screws instead. :(

Comments

[astridv]

That sucks. There are firms specialized in data retrieval but they're not cheap, I think. My parents had to pay a couple hundred Euro to retrieve a few thousand photos from their decaying laptop hard drive. Anyway, I hope you don't have any essential data on your disk.

... come to think of it I should really make backup myself, my last one was exactly one year ago.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I can't afford professionals, especially not if I want to buy a new laptop. And I miss having one. That will be bad enough for extra expense, even if I get a cheap one.

There is a bunch of stuff I miss, but most of it is more annoying than tragic. Like I have a todo file, where I dump fanart ideas, keep a list of books I come across that I find interesting and might want to read, as well as a list of books I read in any year in case I want to make a summary post at the year's end, files with half drafted posts, and recs, another thematic list I had started (for SGA fics focusing on Atlantis support staff/ordinary jobs there) a lot of little files like that, that each in themselves aren't that important, but it sucks that they are now all gone.

I'm fairly sure I have all of my digital fanart as copies somewhere or at least most of it (on the net are only the low res versions, the files I keep are usually much better), because I'm slightly better about backups for that. With media and such there is an upside to the laptop being so old. because its HD was only 40GB, so most media I usually stored elsewhere after watching (though I lost some recent stuff). I lost my non-fannish mail (the fandom mail goes through gmail and I have copies there), nothing truly important or that I would have even looked at again necessarily, but it makes my hoarding nature unhappy not to have my old mail. Also a bunch of fanfic and fanart I've saved over the years, some of which isn't online anymore, and screencaps as well as other art references.

I'll give the screws another try with a better screwdriver which I'll get tomorrow. I mean, surely it has to be possible to get this stupid hard disk out of the metal frame, so that I can try to connect it.