Help needed about saving photos from dead hard drive

[bigTillyMint]

Our PC isn't working properly - we can't get on the internet or open the program (zoom browser) all our photos are saved on.

I have taken it to a local IT geek who reckons the hard drive is dead (it is 7? years old) but could save the photos for about £80 labour and £80 for an external back-up hard-drive (dunno if this is the right term!)

DH thinks this is very expensive. Is it?

bump

Depends how big the "backup" drive is going to be - 80 quid these days can buy you 1000 GB (1 TB or TeraByte) so check what drive is being offered - if it's anything under 500 GB say you will buy your own for the IT geek to use.

Not sure what you mean by "zoom browser" as software to access the photos - any more details, please?

If the PC boots up, then it may be quite easy to backup your files (ie buy an external drive and make copies of your files, including the photos!) and then you could re-install the software from scratch, as well as getting the machine back onto the internet.

Anybody technical where you or DH works, that might do it for less?

Zoom Browser - looks like it may be some software for Canon camera's. Canon.jp ZoomBrowser Expect it saves images to the hard drive - is that right?

If the hard drive is dead... how can the images be recovered - does the geek have special hardware device for doing that, or were they just going to plug it into another PC and hope for the best? Maybe the drive just fails to boot - can you give any further info regarding what the fault actually is?

£80 seems a bit high for a new drive... especially when one (or several) USB memory stick could be used to backup data - it's only data after all. Maybe the geek meant replacing your exisiting drive with a new drive and then transferring any data that could be recovered from the old drive over.

Maybe worth getting a second opinion from another IT company, to see if they can suggest other options.

Sounded to me like providing a separate, external drive (eg on USB). Just saw an advert for Ebuyer.com where they have a Samsung 500 GB external drive (here: www.ebuyer.com/product/177266 ) for 59.99 with free delivery (and they now take orders up to 11pm weekdays) order before 5pm on Saturday for Monday delivery (that makes Royal Mail seem like "history" to me).

Thanks, Guys!

Yes, Zoom Browser is the software came with the camera to download the pictures.

The PC still comes on, and we can still use word and maybe some other office applications (?), but we cannot get onto the internet nor open Zoom Browser.

I thinks the geek{grin] meant what you suggest, nannynick - "replacing" the old drive with a new one to transfer all the data on the PC. But then we could use it as a back-up for a new machine?

So is he charging too much? (we are in London!)

It's hard to know. I would wonder though if a new drive would actually fix the problems or not.

Have you considered a new computer? The costs of new hardware these days is quite low and given that your machine is 7 years old, it may have quite a slow processor.

Have you tried looking for the pictures manually on the drive? For example, look for files in C:\Program Files\Canon\ZoomBrowser EX\Image Library One - or something like that.

If the files are intact then they can be copied to portable media (USB memory for example).
What sort of files will they be... JPG, TIF, RAW? I think Canon do a file convert utility if .RAW

Connection to the internet could be various things. Given the computer boots, I wouldn't have suspected the drive initially... more a configuration issue or possibly comms hardware. When you say it won't connect - can you be any more specific? For example... do you know if the computer is getting an IP address? How is it connecting... a dial-up modem... ethernet or WiFi to a router?

Webdude - would you suspect the drive in this situation... or do you also think it may be configuration related? Interested in your view. I know it's rather hard given the info we have.

BTM - I would get a second opinion on it. It boots, it loads some progs and not others. When trying to access files, do you get a message saying something like - failure to read file... Retry, Abort, Ignore?

DH is an IT geek. He says £80 for labour is cheap, the work could take hours. Impossible to diagnose without seeing the computer but as there are likely to be bad sectors on the hard drive (7 years is old) you could lose everything if the whole thing dies. For your own peace of mind get him to copy everything on to a new external hard drive, not just your photos, and you can use it as a back up for your new computer too.

You get massive amounts of storage for £80.

After losing all my photos when my harddriv died and thinking I would never get them back (and I have thousands as I am a CM, and take loads of the kids) I got them back when one of my IT dads saved them for me.

I then went straight and bought Flicr Pro for about £17.00 a year and uploaded every photo into their vault.

I can never lose them again, plus my Mindees Parents can see them if I invite them.

it put my mind at rest.

If you dont take that many a month you can get Flicr for free.

There are quite a few different free ones, Snapfish, Photobucket etc.

Think what you quoted sounds quite cheap.
Our computer died on us on Friday. Fortunately, after leaving it to "rest" for a while we managed to revive it, though it is very very very slow.
Bought an external hard drive for over £100, though it does have a tetrabyte. And we're now having to spend ages transferring files and photos (more than £80 worth of our time).

Then had to buy a new computer as the man in the Apple store said that a 6 year old computer is very very ancient.

I agree that £80 for labour is cheap. I'm just not sure what you are getting for that - not sure it will actually result in a usable machine, if that's what you are aiming for. Thus why I am suggesting a second opinion, just so you have something to compare it to.

The £80 is just to recover and save the photos, it would be £150 to get the machine working again, but the IT geek has said that it would probably be better to get a new one.

DH is going to ask IT geek at work what he thinks, and I am going to ask an IT savvy friend!

"would you suspect the drive in this situation... or do you also think it may be configuration related?"

Sometimes files can be lost (will turn up again if one runs checkdisk) but lots of possibilities, including something corrupting the registry (so cannot find important config files).

Copying files to an external hard drive is perhaps the simplest way to back up what is there, but may need a few "tricks" to also copy system/hidden files/ directories. Certainly worth getting the work's IT man to take a look, and copying files should be a 'start it going' job first thing one day, and no need to look at it again while paid-for work gets done, a glance at lunchtime and it might be done, based on an older PC probably having 40/ 80 GB hard drive, even if it is full... won't take all day (unless there are problems with bad blocks, and read errors).

Reinstalling the Canon software might be an option, but as someone else indicates, using some online storage might also be worth considering - but shutting down PC and unplugging the external drive means a copy of the files is safe - best use right-click and "properties" to see how many GB are on original and on "copy" to see that all went across.

Really awkward to understand exactly what's gone on - if any of the photos have easily remembered filenames then a search might detect which directory (directories) they have been saved in and ensuring those files are all copied to another drive safeguards the images at least, even if one then decides to go back to Windows XP or Vista and start afresh (if one has the manufacturer's CDs to do so).

TheWorstWitch - glad you have a terabyte of storage - prices are, however, coming down, so I suspect that the (relatively) higher outgoing was a result of your need to buy it quickly, and perhaps the cost in local stores, rather than having the chance to buy online and save a bit of cash (or in the 'clearance' section of Maplins, for example).

One other option, if considering purchase of a new PC, is to simply buy an external drive case (rather than external drive) and use the old drive in that. Once plugged in, you have your old "main" drive as a backup disk, and can pull files off it (so long as the drive is not physically damaged). You do lose out if software only worked with a particular old version of Windows, however, as most machines bought now will come with Windows 7.

There may be some (eg on Ebay etc) which are being sold with Windows XP Pro or with Vista, and while I'd rarely recommend it (from a legal standpoint) there are copies of Windows XP floating around as 'torrents' for free download, so a new (blank) hard drive for the existing PC could be set up fresh and the external (old) drive used to find old letters/ documents/ spreadsheets/ photos etc.

DISKS and these 'external enclosures':

In recent years, there has been a change from parallel to serial, so the cables are thinner (and looking at what's available at one online store, they seem mostly to expect serial, aka SATA drives).

One would need to check what cable is used to decide if the drive is SATA or not (the older drives were called Parallel ATA or IDE) - see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sata

Next is the size of the drive - laptops use 2.5" diameter drives, desktops usually use 3.5" drives, so the enclosure must match...

Search Amazon.co.uk for "3.5 external hard drive enclosure" and you'll find SATA and IDE at perhaps 15 to 20 pounds, into which the old drive could be put, and viewed with a new PC once it is plugged into a USB port.

Lots of places to buy these enclosures - Amazon, Ebuyer, SVP.co.uk and so on.

Have to say (after my sister brought over her sluggish and old PC, plus an external case for a hard drive) that sometimes the design of external drive cases is odd or awkward - the ones I've used up to now had everything connected to a removable panel, but hers had an on/off button in the case with a (short) cable going to the removable panel - a major pain getting it to fit together!

Thanks for the advice - we decided to go with getting someone to download everything onto an external hard drive, and get a new PC or hard drive.