If you want to just try it on another machine, send me a PM and I'll mail you a cable or an external box so you can make it into a USB drive.

Then just hop over to any WinXP machine, plug it in, and see what you can get to. It may still work fine like others have said, but the OS, or some driver, or some other thing is causing it to blow up and not run.

If you can get ahold of a Knoppix (linux) cd, you can fully boot your computer and run from the cdrom (no installation or hard drive needed) and you can look at the disk. If you get that far, you could hook up and external USB drive to your system and copy files from the knoppix environment to the USB drive.

Of course, if you do not use linux, this could be a difficult path. I use it all the time to access a drive that Windbloze cannot.

The suggestions above for connecting your drive to another system via USB is also really good. At least you can run utilities on it if needed...

Good luck man!

It's not looking good:

I use Syncback - it's free...

every week I back up the photos from drive 1 to drive 2.
Then from drive 1 to an external drive. Takes 2 minutes (incremental)...

And once a month I burn a DVD that I store off site ! If your house were to burn down, all the fancy backups would be just as crispy !!

Sounds like a bad head crash. Hope it's not, hard to recover data from a disc covered in divots.

The heads "fly" on a cushion of air and if they drop it's kind of like a plane crashing into the ground.

Someone once gave me the analogy that a head flying over a disc is like a jet fighter flying at mach2 three feet off the ground.


Good Luck,
Scott

I'm still waiting to hear from the data recovery folks, but at this point it's just an autopsy. I found that I backed up all the important photos last summer. Everything since has been photos of DE's or the baby. Everything in the last 18 months has pretty much been saved in the baby folders. My wife has been uploading tons of stuff to snapfish (since it's easier to load that bad with the good) and I can resurrect enough of my other photos from other sources (imageshack, etc.)

I'll lose some DE videos that I have already uploaded to google, some tech manuals that I have on CD (somewhere) and all my d/led music, which is already on my ipod. I guess I can't get it off the ipod on to a new machine, can I?

Sure, some old tax records, but I think I'll be OK there, usually I back that up and put it in the file.

Well, here's the follow up. We had taken the comptuer to ADR Data Recovery. They have a local office, but sent the drive somewhere. They found that the drive had some physical damage, but they believed that they could recover a significant portion. They sent me a txt file showing everything that they could read. It was 7 megs. It was funny to page through all of the tmp files to find what I wanted back.

In the end they wanted $1775 to recover what they could. I opted to not revive the data since I had a lot of it backed up.

But, I do have a question. Is there any way to get the files off my iPod and into my new PC? I have a bunch of stuff that let's just say I don't have the source disc for and would like to keep them. ;)

I use ITunes, but don't upgrade it and really only use it off of one computer and my music is stored on a RAID server anyway. There are a number of tools out there. One app that comes to mind is
Ephpod. One of my co-workers uses it, and I know at one point we used it to get acces to my Ipod at work. Check it out. It may work for you.

Dave

theres a non applie program called ipod2pc... it's not freeware though

It's cheaper than $1,775. :0

Thanks, I'll check it out.

You can also try anapod explorer from redchair software - not free but works well.

I just d/led the test version of ipod2pc. It looks promising. MAKE SURE to read the ipod hints before proceeding.

Mikester, re:Anapod....can you still d/l songs from itunes and use them with this software?

Finally did this...ipod2pc is cool. Worked well. Worth the $20.