External Hard Drives, Backing-up.

[Javert]

Well my Hard Drive died on me over the weekend. It must've been too fragmented with only 3 GB left of a 160 GB HD. Explorer.exe had an Application Error. And not even re-installing Windows worked (redundancy error check). Boot Diagnostics labeled it a "Case Error 7", in a sense a read/write error according to tech support. So I'm getting a replacement HD from the warranty. My questions are the following:

1) Am I still able to retrieve data from the previous hard drive, either moving the data to the new hard drive with the functioning Windows or to an external hard drive? We plan to install the damaged hard drive in a secondary bay of the tower.

2) What are some good external hard drives/specs? I was going to get one anyway. Do not point me to links/sites, I've seen them all. I'm looking for recommendations or personal experience. Western Digital? Seagate? LaCie?

Help/Comments appreciated. Thanks.

 

[duffers20]

You might be able to recover the data by using a professional data recovery firm, as they will be able to dismantle the drive and use parts that work with it inorder to recover the data. If you do take that option then you need to get the firm to provide documentation on what they did to the drive so that you can claim your warrenty. I looked into this when my Seagate drive died, but I felt there wasn't any need.

As for your question on external drives, western digital or seagate are both good makes.

Hope this helps.

 

[Asus]

Lacie is a very solid external harddrive. From what I've seen it also is faster than the Western Digital externals.

If you want something that has one button backup then Maxtor drives include really good software for that.

 

[Javert]

You might be able to recover the data by using a professional data recovery firm, as they will be able to dismantle the drive and use parts that work with it inorder to recover the data. If you do take that option then you need to get the firm to provide documentation on what they did to the drive so that you can claim your warrenty. I looked into this when my Seagate drive died, but I felt there wasn't any need.

As for your question on external drives, western digital or seagate are both good makes.

Hope this helps.

Thanks. Well if I choose to goto a 3rd-party, they say that as long as nothing's damaged the warranty holds.
But would the aforementioned way work?