Need money for harddrive restoration

I’m in serious need to scrape together cash for restoring my harddrive at a professional media restoration service, and you have the ability to help me.


Background story:
On the evening of the last Friday in February 2003, I was in the middle of preparing my weekly radio show after being absent for a couple of weeks due to a different hardware issue. All of a sudden, the computer stopped responding, resulting in a system breakdown at the time. The next couple of hours was spent trying to revive the computer, which refused entirely to as much as start up. Surely, it would power up, but it just wouldn’t go as far as loading Windows XP. Only unplugging my 20 GB harddrive from the rest of the computer appeared to allow a start up, and I could narrow the source of the problem down to the harddrive I had been using as a data storage drive for the past couple of years being defective.

To add to my worries, it would seem that the music I had collected and work I had performed for the last five years was irretrievable and lost forever. Considering that the harddrive was full (with less than a hundred MB to spare), that’s a lot. Although I bought the harddrive back in 2001, I had moved all of my work I had collected through the years – from the time I started using a personal computer – onto this harddrive, and now it was gone. Can you imagine my pain?

Fortunately, there are companies like Ibas that are able to recover data from a crashed harddrive, but they charge about an arm and a leg just to take the harddrive in for analysis, and the other arm and leg to extract the data. Seems unfair, but there’s not a lot I can do about it. There are a bunch of songs that are not available anymore on the music market, as well as a whole lot of business and personal data that are just too nostalgic to give up on. I reckon the price tag would be at least $1,500 (American dollars) to recover all the lost bits.

If you want to help me cover the costs, please do donate using PayPal by clicking the button above, or contact me for other donation alternatives.

Since then, I’ve bought a new 20 GB harddrive complete with better ventilation as well as a 200 GB external drive run through a USB connection, so I doubt I’ll run out of space for a long time.