Disaster

[steve25805 121,447]

Disaster has occurred. My laptop has died and I have lost my vast collection of pics and many of my vids, much of which was not backed up. My heart is not in rebuilding my pic collection from scratch, so from now on will likely be posting fewer pics, aiming for quality rather than quantity.

If anything of late, I have been focussing too much on pics and neglecting other forms of contributions anyway, so my input should be more varied and rounded going forwards.

[Scot_Lover 1,789]

You still have everything, just keep the HD, you can still access them from another PC. I've done this so many times, you will be surprised what you can recover.

[Admin 14,369]

Sorry to hear that Steve, although Scot's right, it's very unlikely everything is lost. If the hard drive wasn't even the problem, you can probably still access everything on another PC. 

However, either way, it seems some good can potentially come from it if it means you have more time to focus on other areas. Plus, I imagine a vast proportion of your collection is already uploaded on PeeFans, so it will always be accessible. In particular, your club uploads where everything is categorised. 

[Guest UnabashedUser]

Sorry to hear. Hope you can image that old HD.

Edited August 31, 2018 by UnabashedUser

[steve25805 121,447]

Not sure how to go about retrieving or accessing stuff from my fucked laptop, or how to access the hard drive, or even what exactly the hard drive is and what it looks like. I will have to do a lot of researching how when I have the time.

But Admin is right. Most of my pics at least have already been posted onto this forum.

[Brutus 2,111]

4 hours ago, steve25805 said:

Not sure how to go about retrieving or accessing stuff from my fucked laptop, or how to access the hard drive, or even what exactly the hard drive is and what it looks like. I will have to do a lot of researching how when I have the time.

But Admin is right. Most of my pics at least have already been posted onto this forum.

Start with YouTube for demonstrations of how to do it. You may even find a video of your exact pc being opened up. YouTube taught me how to repair my ps2, Xbox 360, and ps4 over the years. Not a dime spent, save for a 5 dollar set of screwdrivers. Either way, no big deal, hard drive removal is fairly straight forward. The key to any computer related hardware work is a cool head and calm approach, after proper research of what you're trying to do. 

[nopjans 1,144]

Several years ago, the external hard drive I kept all my porn on suffered catastrophic data corruption, and all of those videos were lost. I've re-collected a lot of it since then, and new things as well, but some things were lost forever. It sucks, and I hope you are able to recover some of it. If I lived in the UK I'd be happy to lend you a hand.

[spywareonya 37,917]

@steve25805

I think everybody consider you the most complete and 360" contributor of the forum

I am so sad this problem occurred, but your friends gave you actual advices

Believe me, there are many ways to extract datas from a broken PC, you just have to know how

The problem is that very likely it will be long and hard if you choose to do it by yourself

Many years ago, Alex suffered a similar problem: in his PC there were many files stolen by his hacker friends, thus he could not simply pay somebody to extract things from it like in every computer assistence shop of the world, he had to do that by himself and it tooks WEEKS

But it can be done

Believe me, nothing it is really lost, this is just a sad impediment

I appreciate @Admin viewpoint, as he encouraged you to stick to your first reaction of willpower and resistence, but indeed you CAN have that stuff back.

Just study how

A limitless kiss, you are still the best

[WantonLee 823]

Oh bummer, thats a blow, steve. 😕

But as it has been said in this thread already, unless the harddrive is damaged, the data on it can be retrieved.

Easiest way would be to remove the harddrive and put it into an external case (should cost around 10-20  ₤ at the most), which then could be connected to any computer as an external drive.

For removing the drive, just look up what Laptop you have and search the net for how to open it and removing the HDD (short for HardDiskDrive, which are mechanical and store data magnetically); newer drives could also be SSD's (short for SolidStateDrives, which are ~basically~ using the same technology as USB-Mermory-Sticks to store data (so no magnetic, spinning disks involed like in HDD's)). There should be a lot of other info in the net that can give you an overview about harddrives (and their different sizes) in general, you might want to check this first. The article at wikipedia is quit good (albeit a bit long), and contains a video right at the start which explains a lot of things even I did not know so far.

Anyway, you are looking for a slim metallic rectangular, about 2.5" wide - regardless if it is an HDD or SSD. (HDD's of 3.5" width are usually used in desktop computers.)

DO NOT TRY TO OPEN THE HDD ITSELF! In doing so, any dust getting onto the disk(s) in the drive (if it is a mechanical one) can immediatly corrupt the data!

 

All you need now is an external HDD-Case, put the drive into it, and connect the drive to any computer (provided it has the right conector, which would be USB 2.0 or 3.0 nowadays). If you are uncertain about what kind of drive you have and what kind of external case you need, just make some photo's and show us what you got; we'll figure it out. 😉

 

[Bacardi 9,230]

It happened to me a few years ago....lost all of my fanfiction and original works. I switched to google drive for writing. I can work on it anywhere I want and can just sign into my google account to retrieve it. Not sure if that can help with pictures or not tho. Im sorry 😔