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courier8377 [he/him, comrade/them] @hexbear.net

4d ago

Anybody have tips for data retrieval for noobs? Seems my laptop is dead

Should i take it in somewhere? Buy drives to hold the data? How much $ am i gonna be set back?

13 comments

Real professional data recovery is expensive as fuck. Like, starting at thousands and going up from there. But throwing the drive from the dead laptop into a usb drive reader is very cheap. How did the laptop die and what kind of drive is it?
- Battery/charging issues, seems kind of working now when plugged in, will look at transferring data off the ssd if/when i need to transfer data over
  
  Yeah you don't need data recovery, worst case you buy a thing like this or maybe this depending on the type of ssd.
  
  sounds extremely fixable
  take it to a shop, they can perhaps repair it for not too much
  now is the perfect time to think about backups in the future in case your computer does get permahosed.
  borgbase.com will give you 10GB of free backup space which you can use with FLOSS Vorta application. 10GB doesn't sound like much but it uses an extreme form of compression so it goes a long way. Use it for your documents and most special pictures/videos. Make sure you read carefully what is required to get back your data!

Yeah like the other comments say, as long as it's not an issue with the drive itself you should be able to just remove the drive and read it pretty easily. If it's not a hard drive it's probably not the actual drive itself that failed, and even if it is a hard drive it's more likely to be something else imo. Taking it to a computer repair shop might still be a good idea if you're not comfortable doing it yourself, but it should be as easy as taking the drive out and plugging it into another computer via the right adapter.
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It really really depends.
Could be anywhere from $0 and 10 minutes of work to thousands of dollars and weeks of time to impossible.
If you know how to make a bootable USB for linux, you could doing that, and don't make any changes to the system, just see if you are able to mount your hard drive from inside linux.
If you know how to dismantle the laptop you could try removing the drive and putting it in an enclosure, and seeing if you could mount it on another computer.
If you aren't sure how to do either of those and your files are valuable, take it in to a shop. Maybe they can fix the whole computer for you.

Depends how the laptop died but most likely you can open the laptop, remove the drive and put it in a cheap USB enclosure to access the files directly from another computer.
Total cost = cost of little screwdriver + appropriate drive enclosure = < $30 probably.
If your laptop died due to drive failure that's gonna cost ya.
- Seems like a battery issue, wasn't charging earlier but reseating the battery it is now posting 255% charge when plugged in. Will look at getting a new battery, recalibrating the one in there now, and getting a new charging board. But fuck this is annoying
  
  Yeah that sounds really irritating. At least it's just a power supply issue tho. Your data will be fine and your laptop will live again.

You have any local friends that use Linux or are otherwise computer savvy? They can help you (barring certain circumstances).
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13 comments