Finally, Good News on the Hard Drive Crash

I've been at it for two weeks now, but finally I have some good news about the great 2008 hard drive crisis.

A guy that I know through one of the nonprofits I'm involved in suggested that he might be able to extract the "dead data" without a whole lot of trouble.

But, since he's a retired cop -- who is an expert in computer forensics -- I thought about it and decided that I really wouldn't feel comfortable with him rummaging around in my hard drive files and stumbling on stuff like "The Anarchists Cookbook" (I swear, judge, it was just research for my new book! No, really! Trust me.), I decided that that probably wasn't really the way to go.

So I did some more poking around in the Internets and found a downloadable program from a highly reputable outfit that promised that they could recover the data.

It was pretty simple. I downloaded the program and installed it, and then ran it against my "dead" drive. Amazingly, it was able to recognize all of the stuff that I thought I'd lost.

The only catch? Although it recognized it and claimed that it was able to recover it, there was that one little roadblock: They wanted me to pay for the software, which would unlock it and allow me to actually extract the missing data.

But, it was only $99 -- which is a far cry from the $200 online charge, and I didn't have to put my precious drive in the mail -- so I sucked it up, paid the money, and immediately I was given an unlock code. At 1:30 in the morning!

And it worked -- I've been able to extract all of the missing data from the dead drive. Of course it took it most of the day, but that's to be expected.

The company? Stellar Information Systems, and I am now a highly appreciative and tremendously grateful customer, willing to sing their praises far and wide.

If it ever happens to you, give them a try. And you don't pay anything unless it can actually do the job.