Here’s my story:

I have contacted HP several times by phone and email and nobody did ever gave me a solution. Windows Vista Home Premium –preloaded with my pavillion sg3420la–updated itself and that update damaged and erased the recovery partition. The pavillion was recently bought, december 13, 2008, I’m in Venezuela. I never believed I was going to get such bad customer service from HP. HP told me since my pc is under warranty and its valid they would send me the recovery disks at no cost. UPS was supposed to send the disks. I’m waiting for the disks since january 11. UPS leaved a message on my answering machine with a female voice that can’t be understanded. She gave me a phone number and it’s unclear what is the phone number. I tried to listen to it over 20 times with no avail. UPS doesn’t answer the phones. There aren’t any email addresses in the website for my country. Nobody seems to be there. How come it’s possible that nobody is on UPS at 10 am or 3 pm? It seems UPS it’s making fun of people and it’s disrespectful. The tracking number z5552401 it’s incorrect and I allways get a "not available" message on the UPS website. I’m really dissapointed and upset. I’m no longer waiting for the disk. I will never make a purchase from HP again, unless they give me a free printer or any other gift.

So………did hp customer service or treated you like garbage and seemed to make fun of you? Or did they were unhelpful?

well i accidentally deleted a few folders full of pics on my PC over the weekend. i deleted them and emptied the "recycle bin" without realizing that there were actually some pics in there that i wanted to keep. anyways long story short.. any easy way to recover them? im no computer wiz and if im gonna have to call the geek squad then forget about it.

This is Yahoo Answers backgroup history of problem:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AuJEpv8y.lSuEPDsddHHsb_sy6IX?qid=20070619081033AAiykAR

I have reason to believe these are the safest options:

a) Remove the hard-drive, add it to another functional unit and transfer all the data to external portable hard-drive. Once data is secured, then do a complete re-install of operating system on problem computer.

b) Create Windows startup disk, use disk at startup effectively bypassing the "broken" startup files. Once into computer, manually move important data to external portable hard-drive.
http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10877_11-6031733.html (Option #1)

Does this second option risk any further problems or loss of data??? I can’t risk the loss of any data.

What is my safest option? I am under no time-contraints to do either option. Either action would be performed by knowledgable computer techie.

Any additional comments or things to be aware of?

I had multiple Word-files open in Microsoft Office 2008 on a Mac, and I closed them individually. I saved the ones I needed, and for the last one that I didn’t need I chose "don’t save".

Now it turns out that I really needed the one I didn’t save! It still exists, only in the "old" version - before I worked on it.

Is there any way to restore the changes I made to it?

So, my hard drive on my laptop died. It’s doing the clicking/not spinning up thing. I tried the whole freezer thing, yada yada…basically, I know it’s a mechanical thing and the only hope I have is to go to a data recovery service and get them to take out the data plates and put them in a new drive and recover the data. That said…I know that this process is expensive, but my data is important, and I have money. I am wondering just how expensive it is. I looked into it, saw some prices by the hour, and some "as low as !" prices, but does anyone have any "real" quotes? And if my hard drive is 80 GB and I only need maybe 5 GB recovered, will it cost less than getting the whole 80 recovered?
Just a note, I’m looking for dollar amounts, thanks everyone!

I have contacted HP several times by phone and email and nobody did ever gave me a solution. Windows Vista Home Premium –preloaded with my pavillion sg3420la–updated itself and that update damaged and erased the recovery partition. The pavillion was recently bought, december 13, 2008, I’m in Venezuela. I never believed I was going to get such bad customer service from HP. HP told me since my pc is under warranty and its valid they would send me the recovery disks at no cost. UPS was supposed to send the disks. I’m waiting for the disks since january 11. UPS leaved a message on my answering machine with a female voice that can’t be understanded. She gave me a phone number and it’s unclear what is the phone number. I tried to listen to it over 20 times with no avail. UPS doesn’t answer the phones. There aren’t any email addresses in the website for my country. Nobody seems to be there. How come it’s possible that nobody is on UPS at 10 am or 3 pm? It seems UPS it’s making fun of people and it’s disrespectful. The tracking number z5552401 it’s incorrect and I allways get a "not available" message on the UPS website. I’m really dissapointed and upset. I’m no longer waiting for the disk. I will never make a purchase from HP again, unless they give me a free printer or any other gift.

So………did hp customer service or treated you like garbage and seemed to make fun of you? Or did they were unhelpful?

Have you heard of http://www.californiadataservices.com I am trying to recover a physically damaged drive. I dropped my maxtor 320 GB external hard drive on the floor and am looking for a cheap place to send it because I DO NOT want to spend 0 to recover this data. And California data services has a "no data no charge" policy and I was just wondering if any of you guys have dealth with them before. If not do you have any other suggestions?

problem" pops up, but when I check it on my laptop, which is right behind me, it works fine. I lost everything on this one yesterday and had to start from square one by using a recovery disk. I updated with windows service pack 2 and other than that I don’t know what I should do to get it back to where it was before the virus shut it down.
Thanks for any info.

It’s not listed on their website. I’ve only read that "it’s expensive".

I’m interested in starting a small data recovery service and apparently the Deepspar PC-3000 system really makes the impossible possible.

Just looking for price info. Thanks!
*** Update ***
I found out from DeepSpar that the device costs ,000 USD. That’s what "it’s expensive" means, apparently.

I had a recent system crash while trying to download the service patch2 for Windows XP. It completely disabled my computers internet connections and would not enable me to make a new connection. I brought it to the "Geek Squad" whom told me I needed to run the systems restore disks as it was constantly disabling the systems components. Of course, the biggest problem with that is that I bought the computer used and did not get the recovery disks for it.

I have a dell inspiron B130 computer that needs to be restored to the original settings. I don"t have the recovery disk??????????