Hard Drive burned out

[koolAFO]

Ok my dad has just spent the last 3 -4 hours on the phone with Dell trying to figure out why windows wont boot up. We finally determined that the hard drive has burned out. It can't do anything. Im not mad that it burned out because this has happened to me 3 times in the last 2 years so I'm used to it. What I'm really mad about is that this computer and HD are only 1 month old. I'm also really F'n pissed that I have just lost roughly 10 gigs of information that is irreplaceable.

My question for you guys is: Is there a cheap way to retrieve the information off of my hard drive?

I know of a company in Cali that cna do this but they charge around $900.

Just for you info I live in Dallas, TX if that will help.

[Rocketmech]

If it wont power on , spin up...your SOL.
Try slaving the drive in another pc , see where you get. If you can see the drive , then your chances of recovery are good.

BTW, hard drives failing is common as millions and millions of drives go, but to have 3 personal drives fail in 2 yrs is not common. You might want to start thinking about "image backups" to CDRW or DVD/RW .

[crossedup]

A few more "symptoms" of the ailing PC might help.

Ive had a few act like that, even a couple newer dells, where the windows install was messed up but the HD was fine. On one of those I thought the HD had gone belly up and was ready to replace it, but turned out it was fine, windows had a fatal error of some sort.

[ukulele]

How many times will it take to learn how to backup your data? When you get the new drive installed, add another one, even if it's a small one, for data backup.