Urgent fix needed

Im a landlord, i have years of Books on my CPU. never been online with it ever. Completely isolated. After I finished monthly books it suddenly went off. Shut down without shut down.... Repowered nothing, checked power strip, nothing...

Immediately grabbed it and took to repair shop. Its a very important item, has ALL data from years back... plus its October and thats 9 months of this year entered... Backed up YES.... ON the same drive... LOL Dont laugh or scold me yet....

Repair shop says the fan stopped, causing the overheating of the motherboard and the Drive will not SPIN..... He can not retrieve any data....

WHAT is your suggestion and best options for this scenario.... Im all ears.

Hundreds or thousands of hours of data at risk.... I asked about removing the platter and reinserting into another drive.. said cant b done..

Thanks

Steve

 

My initial thought is that would have to be one heck of an overheating to kill the HD along with the more vulnerable motherboard components. Is the shop reliable?

Have you tried the HD to another computer? That would be the simplest thing to confirm that it doesn't actually spin up. It just seems like too much of a coincidence that the HD has failed along with the motherboard. If you can wait for mail order something like this will make the connection externally but internal is not difficult.

If the HD really doesn't spin up at all, I don't have any suggestions. Professional data retrieval is extremely expensive ~$1000.

 

I'm going with gvstn on this one.

Attach the alleged faulty drive to another PC, and see if you can read data from it.

For future reference, you can attach more than one hard drive to a motherboard. When you get back up and running, make sure you have a second storage drive in addition to the regular OS drive and copy data to it.

 

You are lucky you did not get burned sooner.
I never keep a backup in the same location as the original. Also, if the data is really important (as in photos), I usually burn to a CD and store at a 2nd spot on a USB stick, spare sd card or external hard drive.