One Finger Salute - Seagate Recovery Services

So there was a hard drive crash in the family. No big deal, even though it took some time to track down a similar sized hard drive to replace it. $40 is not that bad to spend on a brand new 80GB hard drive. During my search, I came across Seagate Recover Services. They say they can recover data from any drive and even have a No Data, No Pay guarantee.

I didn't call their toll-free phone number since I knew I'd be chatting with someone from the Far East and I really didn't want to go through that kind of pain. On the website there was an option to do an online chat session. Now we're cooking with gas! So I click on the icon and fill out the little form and within minutes I'm chatting with someone from the Far East. Rupa's accent didn't show up at all through the keyboard.

Unfortunately it was probably the shortest chat session I've ever had with someone online. Rupa asked me if it was a standalone hard drive. Yes. She asked what the drive's capacity was. 80GB. Then she asked if I could see the drive in Windows. No. Then she asked if I could see the drive in BIOS. No again. She then offered two options: A - Priority service that would recover my data in 2 to 5 business days for $2500 or B - Economy service that would recover my data in 2 to 3 weeks for only $1700.

Jiminy Tap-Dancing Christmas!

Needless to say, a couple of hundred pictures and some MP3s ripped from a few dozen CDs on a $40 hard drive wasn't worth $1700. Instead I counter offered Seagate Recovery Services a single finger.

On another note, be sure to spend that extra $20 at Dell for their Full Recovery CD. Normally they put that data on the hard drive, which does you NO good when the hard drive crashes. With the CD at least you can go back to when the PC was purchased. $20 is worth the two days it took to format the drive and install Windows XP along with all the software and drivers.