DATA RECOVERY for a hard drive that isn't recognized.

Hi,
I just found today that my hard drive is bad. I had one of those geek squad people come look at it and he was able to get it to boot from the Mac OS X Leopard CD, but my hard drive was no where to be seen.
I'm taking the hard drive to one of those places that specializes in data recovery. But, I was wondering...can they retrieve files that were on the desktop? Or are those files gone forever?

Hello Again! Now that there is serious soul searching going on now would be a good time to think about your backup plans for when you get everything up and running again. If the drive is going off to the recovery center worrying further won't help so I suggest coming up with a good recovery plan for times like these. Hard drives are going to fail and they always seem to fail at the most inopertune times but with a good backup plan this could have only been a restart. A second hard drive is a must if there is anything at all important on the computer. It can be an external or internal. I have 4 320 gig SATA drives in my G4 (and I really don't have anything very important on there) I usually keep two secondary bootable clones and rotate between them in case of a backup failure. Then I try to keep another clone on an external and finally I keep a partition with only a fresh install and my utilities for drive repair. I tinker a lot and I've screwed things up a few times but it really wasn't even a minor irritation. Good luck. Tom

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