The Click of Death...(Prayer Needed)

I could really use some prayer right now. We just lost the main AND secondary drives on our family's main computer. The CPU had had some overheating issues, so I cleaned the dust out of the case and then checked it for stability. It was running fine (and cool under major load), so I put the side back on the case and left it to run overnight. When I got up in the morning, it had bluescreened again like it had overheated. Mom hit restart, and when the BIOS came up, it said the main drive had failed, and the second was in bad condition. Both drives started making the dreaded Click of Death that signifies that it is a mechanical failure, not just a chip burnout (which still be fixed relatively easily). I tried it in a different computer--no go. Some people have had success with cooling off a failing hard drive and getting one last boot out of it to pull the data off. It's not working for me, though. To cut a long story short, the second drive failed when I tried to boot off of it--and neither the freezer trick nor anything else I have tried is working. The main drive seems to be unable to initialize, not to speak of spin up. The second one just can't spin up, even though the electronics seem OK.

And here comes the bad news: when I started looking around for backups, the latest I had was a February 14th backup--and it was incomplete. To save time, I had not backed up ANY of my film footage or masters. I have the only extant masters of seven separate short films on that drive (four of them mine) including three San Antonio semi-finalists. Obviously, I'm about to come unglued over it--I don't know why the Lord is putting me through this, but I'm having to pray for faith to deal with all this a lot right now. I have been researching recovery options, and I understand that a recovery service can in some types of hardware failure open up a drive in a cleanroom and swap the platters to another drive to pull the data off, just as long as it's not too badly damaged. The only thing is that that sort of service STARTS at $600 PER DRIVE, and I just don't have that sort of money at the moment. Something strange--both drives--from different manufacturers, one used at least 4-6 months longer than the other, with very different usage patterns--failed within 12 hours of each other with a physical hard drive crash.

Anyrate, I could really use some prayer. I have the drives on ice (literally, but don't worry, they're sealed up) and I'm praying that they will stay stable until I can check out the options for possibly getting them recovered in the future. As it is, it's only the Lord's mercy that I have as much of it as I do backed up--I was rather remiss with backups, needless to say, and I only backed that 10GB up because I thought I had a virus in February. So if y'all can pray that we have the faith to deal with this and start reconstructing everything on those drives (it wasn't just video, it was the main family computer for four years)... And if anybody knows anything about hard drive recovery...well, I'd be glad to hear something. Pretty stressed right now...

In His Service,
John Calvin