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Stupid Geek Squad, Charges my friend even though they didint fix anything.

M

MainFramed

Diamond Member
haha, so my buddy takes his IBM thinkpad to best buy cause his hard drive quit on him. They run diagnostics on it for 60.00 and then do a "advanced hdd diagnostic" for 70, and then they tell him "Sorry your reader is broken nothing we can do" wtf.

anyone know if its possible to still pull information from it with the reader broken, like put a new reader or something in it...😕
 
you can bring it in to advanced data recovery shops but most of them cost $1000 to recover data bit by bit from a bad disk drive.

and also, anyone using geeksquad probably deserves to have their money taken from them. either too stinkin rich or have a serious lack of IT friends, and trust me there are a lot of people who know computers.

and what the hell is a reader?
 
mount it into another computer as a slave

from command prompt, type "chkdsk *: \r" where * is the drive letter (without quotes)
 
Ah, the Geeksquad "diagnostic" fee. I agree it's a little silly since they rarely detail what exactly they did to diagnose, but their fees are generally all disclosed up front (or available upon request).

There are simple data recovery tools out there, if you're just looking to get the data and toss the drive. However, if you're willing to give more complete drive recovery a shot (an admittedly longer process), give a tool like SpinRite a try. This would be my first recommendation. If the drive isn't too far gone, drive recovery may actually give him a workable drive back.

There's probably a better subforum for this, by the way.
 
hook it up to a desktop with an adapter as a secondary drive

use the program "Get Data Back"

proftit
 
Originally posted by: GuideBot
mount it into another computer as a slave

from command prompt, type "chkdsk *: \r" where * is the drive letter (without quotes)
Click to expand...

Not the best idea if the drive is physically going bad though. IE makes a ping pong noise.
If it's physically broken then your only real option is someone like DriveSavers... but as mentioned already - it gets expensive fast.
 
Well by reader they could mean the sensor on the end of the control arm

If that is the case then do the following

1. buy an identical drive off ebay or new
2. build / rent / buy a clean room
3. swap the platters from the two drives
4. hook the new drive with the old platters to a computer and back up your data.
5. profit.
 
Go to download.com, search for "Harddrive recover", click the "Free" button on licenses, download one of the many programs available, enjoy.
 
Get a program called R-Studio. It costs like $40, and as long as the platters will spin, it'll almost always recover your data.
I had a RAID0 striped array fail on me once. I formatted the drives, and I ran R-studio, and managed to recover 98% of my stuff.
 
For diagnostics, go to the drive manufacturer website and download the diagnostic tools they provide. For diagnosing other problems, google will be more help than Geek Squad and it will cost you nothing.

Geek Squad is a complete ripoff.
 
So does Geek Squad ever back up data before running a hard drive diagnostic which could potentially kill an already dying hard drive?

If I were you i'd hook the HDD up to another comp or boot from a CD based OS like knoppix or ubuntu, and retrieve any data possible. But if indeed there is something wrong with reading head/arm or motor, then the data could be impossible to recover without going to a pricey data recovery place.

Oh yea, and Geek Squad sucks.
 
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