Data Recovery

re-establish his AOL account on another computer and see what mail he has. it seems to me they started keeping user mail on their server but i could be full of it. for data recovery, check out www.on-line.com. they have on-line estimates. don't screw with any recovery software yourself if the data is important if you want my 2 cents. good luck

You said he uses aol for internet e-mail... is that the web page or setup through outlook or...?

you could probably recover those files yourself...

All you have to do is get a program called "Easy Recovery" - inexpensive program for what it does.

Just have to make an emergency boot disk from this program, slave that hard drive on another pc as the secondary, boot from the disk, recover any files needed and save them to the good drive. Rebuild that machine with a new hard drive, transfer files back and test.

** This will only work if the system bios or program can detect that there is a hard drive there... bad sectors or corrupt drive do not matter as long as the system can identify the drive. If it cannot, then it is beyond normal means of repair. Then you would have to outsource for thousands of dollars for an off-site repair - Which Easy Recovery also provides service for.

I hope this assists you on this problem. Good luck.

-Joseph

There are MANY drive recovery companies out there, and some of them cost a lot. The questions you need to ask: how important are these e-mails (and why weren't they backed up?) I'm assuming that if the drive has crashed and won't boot AT ALL, you most assuredly will need a data recovery service. Even then you may spend a few hundred bucks before they tell you that the data may not be recoverable. There is never a guarantee you can get your data back. IF the drive will boot, you may be able to run it long enough to do a drive-to-drive copy using Drive Image (Power Quest). Then just plug the new drive in and you're good to go. Otherwise there are options available to recover data yourself (like Executive Software 'Undelete') but it's not for a crashed drive but for accidental deletion of files. It works well but the user MUST stop using the drive of some of the deleted files may be overwritten. (Sorry for the bad news.) Good luck.

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