Disaster, Recovery

My iBook was stepped on and sustained the sole injury of a damaged hard drive. The machine decided it no longer had a hard drive: no diagnostic software even reported the existence of anything other than the DVD/CD-RW combo drive on the IDE chain. The best explanation for this “forgotten hard drive” was a broken controller chip on the drive itself.

I replaced the drive in the iBook myself, swapping in another 40 gigger. Replacing a hard drive in an iBook is a hideous, miserable exercise in screws, plates, brackets, some more screws, tabs, screws, and then some screws. So many screws. But it’s done, and I’m writing this from a clean install of Panther, for better and, well, worse.

As I mentioned before, I don’t have many physical possessions. I do, however, have quite a lot of data. My last backup of my home directory, excepting the 22-odd GBs of music, was roughly a month ago. My mail is kept remotely via IMAP, thankfully. But I need that hard drive working again long enough get my music and a few other sundry files off of it.

Any suggestions or experiences with data recovery services?

What a crappy weekend.