"it fucked up his diagnostic testing machine"
hmm, doubt
I'm out $150
that sounds like a lot of money for a non repair? did he give you a technical explanation of the drive status
There are proper forensic hard drive recovery companies out there, expensive, like hundreds of $ expensive... I suggest trying one that a server forum would recommend.
recovery of data from a very dead hard drive is possible, they just replace the PCB with a test spare
some fucking virus
it would be useful if you detailed this, like if it's a ransomware one then you may be fucked
. And now the timely reminder for everyone else in here to think "oh shit...", and go and buy a $50 external hard drive and backup their stuff, then dump it on the shelf and never touch it again
then go buy a second external hard drive and backup their stuff every few weeks, or dump it on some cloud facility, or gasp, some DVDs (nearly everyone's personal stuff will fit on one DVD...)
. .
and a shoutout to this guy https://www.voidtools.com/
who wrote an excellent file search tool "Everything", that just works, so you can scatter your stuff all over the place and his app will still find it
It was a BSOD. Windows couldn't find a driver and couldn't repair it. Guy still has my laptop but I'm not paying $150 for him just to tell me that he couldn't recover my data. Said he'll give me a replace the hard drive with a used one and re-install windows 10.
I don't know what kind of virus it was. Just one that completely fucked my computer.
I'm so goddamed pissed off
It was a BSOD. Windows couldn't find a driver and couldn't repair it.
First thing I would have done is get hold of a "live" Linux operating system on a USB stick (this is easy to do, look it up), boot your computer from that and see whether you can read anything off the drive.
If not, you could try recovery software (but that sounds like what your PC "dealer" did and it didn't work?) --There are reputable companies you can look up online that can usually recover data from any drive (unless you got some ransomware or something that encrypted it). Look for one that won't charge you if they can't.
sounds like windows update is still working right.
Actually I think it said likely "cannot find drive or something like that" it seems to me like the message when you leave a non booting cd, dvd, or floppy in the player and windows doesn't look for a hard drive when it's set to boot from a disk first then focuses only on the disk not trying to find a harddrive with a boot sector. That Metallica cd I forgot in the coffee cup holder stopped my system from booting..
If you told him it was a virus then he shouldn't have still been trying to boot the computer with it?
If you want the laptop back then tbh get an SSD instead
normally he will have a recovery machine that clones the hard drive without booting anything, a driver is not required. Then the recovery is done with that clone mounted as a data drive, and the original drive kept untouched in case it's just a dead PCB
he should also have been able to identify what virus it was to be able to asses the damage
Do you know any IT literate people? It shouldn't be hard to find someone better than that guy, they could mount the drive and tell you what the virus is, then you'd be able to assess whether it's worth the fee
alternatively, no fix no fee companies exist
personally I'd be asking him what steps he took to recover the data, what the virus was, and refuse to pay if he doesn't have a clue
He wasn't able to recover the data and told me to ship it out to some specialist company in California which would cost anywhere from $200-800.
Apparently he's putting a new (used) SS HD in now for $150 and the diagnosis was free. Said he took the HD out to test it and it froze his diagnostic test kit/tool.
He still has my laptop and I haven't paid him any money yet.
Get your laptop back, buy a hard disk and put it in yourself. Easy peasy. Dude will probably put some illegal kmspico windows bootleg on your drive and you'll have to deal with that crap forever. That happened to me. I wanted to kill the dude. It worked but it's a pain in the arse.
Also, you can probably reinstall Windows for free because your system will have a product key on it, or a built-in hardware key that Windows recognizes.
Whatever you do keep your old drive. At the very least you can hook it to a USB adapter and copy data off it. It's probably not all gone. But like others said, boot off a Windows CD/USB and run the startup disk repair option.
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