Originally Posted by fredl

I'm glad that you got most of your files back. If upgrading to Snow Leopard or Leopard is an option, you might want to consider using the time machine feature in the future.

Originally Posted by chanp

I have an old computer I want to get my data (pics) off my HD. I got a hard drive enclosure, but it has a different type of connection. Its from a sony laptop about 5 yrs old. It has a plug at the end of it that hooked into the computer. Is that a SATA connection? Its a toshiba 60g hard drive if that matters? Any help would be appreciated from the computer experts here

Originally Posted by mbreuer

You need to know what sort of connection the drive has and get an appropriate enclosure (or cable). Note that the enclosures typically are ide->usb or sata->esata. There are some that will do sata->usb, but they cost more. If you just want to get stuff off and not use this as an external drive, you can also get the appropriate cables and just connect the drive to a desktop. There are laptop ide -> desktop ide cables available. The Sata connector should be the same - might need a power adapter however. The cable adapters should be doable for around $10-$20. An enclosure is usually north of $40 (can be way more depending on features - most of which are useless).

If you have access to a laptop into which the drive fits, you can boot from a CD/DVD (linux live cd, for example) and copy the files from the hard drive to a usb stick or network location.

Originally Posted by Efrem

Wasn't an option until this happened because I had some old "classic" OS 9 apps I still wanted to use. Now I realize how little I needed them. Snow Leopard (10.6) still isn't an option, since it's Intel-only and this is a G4 PowerBook, but I'm considering 10.5. I just want to wait until the mail situation is squared away so as not to introduce too many variables all at once. (Or, I could replace the PowerBook with a refurb MacBook Pro from Apple.)

Originally Posted by jackal

I've heard nothing but positive things about Drivesavers since I first started using Macs in the early 1990s.

I recently asked them for a quote to recover data off of my dead 100GB internal drive (I had a backup, but in the process of copying files from my backup via the command line, I thought I had accidentaly deleted 25GB of pictures from my recent trip to Australia).

They have two options: a flat fee for JPG recovery and a prorated fee based on how much data they recover.

The prorated option would have cost between $700 and $1900 to recover data off of my drive, depending on how much of the drive's data they could recover. The flat-fee JPG file recovery was $950.

I ended up locating the files in a buried subfolder and not needing the services of Drivesavers, but I thought I'd post the prices here. I knew Drivesavers was expensive, but those prices shocked me.

I wish they had some lower-cost options that are based on actual time and materials labor. Some drive recoveries (such as the one in your case) are relatively easy--just hook it up to a machine, hit "start" on recovery software, and boom, you're done. Total technician time: 10 minutes, plus maybe an hour of unattended recovery time to rebuild your B-tree nodes. Others require hours and hours of technician time to physically disassemble the drive in a clean room and reconstruct it into working physical media and require the technician to babysit the recovery process and reconstruct the data--like this one. It seems now that those who have minor issues are forced to pay prices that assume the worst.

My favorite drive-recovery experience: my 1999 PowerMac G4 came with a 10GB Quantum Fireball CX. The drive truly lived up to its name, and the drive's logic board shorted out and one of the chips on top had a small mark of melting. Fortunately, the drive was under warranty (can't remember if the warranty was directly from Quantum or from Apple), so I had a replacement shipped to me (same model with minor improvements--the melting was a known issue of the CX series). Before I swapped drives, I took the new drive's logic board off, put it on my old drive, plugged that drive into my friend's computer, copied the data off, and then reassembled everything back to normal before sending the old drive off. Total time, including drive time over to my friend's house: an hour. Total cost: free. Drivesavers would have probably charged me a thousand bucks.

Originally Posted by chanp

Thanks for the response. Ill try that. I have the drive out of the laptop right. When it was in, it sorta cycled and said couldnt recognize an operating system. Then sometimes it would let me view the info on the drive then go into saying the same thing as above. I just want my old pics off the drive.