[TriLUG] call for help

[Stephen Hoffman]

I just received a call from an employee in absolute panic.  Her hard drive
crashed and naturally she didn't have any backups.  There isn't much
sensitive information on there, but she has a 5 month old baby, whose
whole record of existence is on that HD (in digital picture format!)

Does anyone know of or have good experience with a good place to take a HD
to try to recover data? She's in the Wilmington area, but I don't think
she cares where it's recovered.  From what she said to me, it doesn't
sound like the drive itself went completely kaput, but more then likely
some sort of OS corruption, it sees the boot partition and tries to load
windows then dies.  Dell swears that the drive is bad, and will be out
later this week to replace it.  She is obviously a windows person, but
when the dust settles, I'll definitely be FedEx-ing her a knoppix CD
(don't think now is the time to play the "if you were using linux" card).

Both she and I thank you in advance for any pointers.

Steve