coolcalico2001

Going all the way back to Christmas - I received an add'l gb of ram. What I didn't know, was there was a recall on this ram, and after installing it in my computer, it scorched my board. I cut the power off immediately, but even that wasn't enough - my board was toast.

My board was 2 years old (I received it for christmas, 2 years prior, haha). I got a new board, and of course had to also upgrade my processor. Obviously, I had to reinstall windows because of the different board. I had gotten another hard drive, and installed windows on that so that I could get my files off of my old hdd. My newly built computer was running vista ultimate.

I (like a dope) had my administrator previledges password protected on my old disk (xp pro), so I didn't have the permissions to get the files off of my hard drive. I had tried everything from reinstalling windows on another partition and making all the setting the same (which had worked for me in win2k, no go for xp pro tho).

I finally found a friend that just happened to have the same board as my old one (YAY!). I installed the hard drive, and made some changes so that I would be able to navigate the hard drive, and copy the files onto my new hard drive.

Unfortunatly, my friend dropped my drive....... on a tile floor. It's intermittently spinning, but with a clicking noise - or just not spinning at all. BIOS will pick it up, however, upon entering CMOS, I get a nasty error - and the drive won't show in 'my computer'. I have some valueable stuff on the drive, and I feel like a retard for not backing the stuff up. My friend had suggested freezing the hard drive... I've read online where this works, and I've read that its one of the most known myths in the computer world.

Has anyone tried it? Your experience?

My friend also gave me contact information for a data retreival place used when his hdd crashed, but their fee is only a flat rate of $219 - that doesn't seem nearly high enough to successfully pull information off this wasted hdd. They don't charge if they can't get the info off - and they advertise non-spinning, clicking hard drives on their website, but I thought data retreival places usually charged a minimum of $1000 or so...

Suggestions? I know I am new, but kindly don't reply with "throw it away and just cut your losses & start over". That's obvious... I'm just looking at my choices now - and that does me no good.

Thanks