[Leica] Computer help!!!

[images at InfoAve.Net (Tina Manley)]

At 10:44 AM 7/23/2005, you wrote:
>Outboard disks, such as those Tina describes, do not involve the IDE 
>controller chip on the motherboard. They are linked with USB2 or FireWire, 
>and, in general, have an IDE chip inside the external disk housing.

All of the drives that have totally failed, meaning they don't spin and on 
the disk diagnositic test they come up with "Fail", have been internal, 
Maxtor drives.  There are 6 of them, all 250GB, all Serial ATA's.  I also 
have 2 interior Maxtor 250GB, IDE drives from the last computer that Dell 
had to replace.  Dell wanted me to send all of them back in when they 
replaced them each time, but I insisted on keeping them to possibly recover 
information (which I have not been able to do). The drives that are still 
working, that I can write to and that pass the diagnostic test, but have 
suddenly had all previously saved information disappear, are external 
LaCie's - 400GB and 120GB - and an external Western Digital 300GB 
drive.  One of the LaCie's is Firewire only, one is USB only and the 
Western Digital is both USB  and Firewire.  Right now I've hooked up my 
last internal C drive to my laptop using an external housing and am trying 
to copy some of the important files onto CDs before it all disappears into 
the ether.  It's a big problem because parts of the programs are scattered 
all over the file system so you can't ever copy everything that you need 
for a program like ProShow Gold.  That's the one that I had done so much 
work on and would love to be able to recover!

I've been in Charleston all week-end babysitting my grandchildren (and 
photographing them with the Leica R 80/1.5 and 100/2.8 lenses).  It was too 
hot to even walk around in Charleston.  Don't ever plan to go there in July 
or August!!  I hoped being away from the computer would help put things in 
perspective, but it only resulted in some sleepless nights as I tried to 
figure out what could be wrong.

Thanks to everybody for all of your suggestions and help.  I'm counting 
tremendously on the Geek Squad which will show up tomorrow at 3:30.   I've 
printed out all of the suggestions and ideas about what might be wrong 
(THANKS!)  Keep your fingers crossed for me and my computer.  I just want 
to be able to access all of my work!!

Leically,

Tina