[weq92f]

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This thread helps drive home the importance of data backup. My main/daily laptop has a second hard drive in the CD/DVD tray that I use to take a backup of data occasionally so that should the main hard drive fail, I'll have a recent copy of the most important stuff.

This same thing can be accomplished using an external hard drive or even some cloud based service ( think Apple or Amazon ). Regardless of the mechanism, the point is that when you have a backup, even an older one, recovery from failure is a lot less painful ( and expensive! ).

OP: I wish you the best in your recovery journey. Please note that sometimes a hard drive will "fail" causing your laptop/machine not to boot but can still be read using another laptop/machine without disassembly or using any hardware tools. Sounds like you already attempted this though.

-klb