So, I came back from a camping trip last weekend, turned on my computer and was greeted with

Primary Hard Disk 0 Not Found
Primary Hard Disk 1 Not Found

This happened to me before, and just reseating the IDE cables fixed it. So I did that again. No dice this time.

I tried replacing the IDE cable but that didn’t fix it either. Since it’s rare to have 2 hard drives fail, and I had this error before but the hard drives turned out to be fine, I thought it might be a bad IDE controller on the motherboard so I took it to PC Onsite.

PC OnSite said that the primary hard drive was bad, but the secondary was okay (my data hard drive), so he just replaced the bad drive. He told me that the drive was unrecognized by everything he put it in.

So then I took the bad drive home, installed it as the secondary (slave) drive in the machine, and then got the same error –

Primary Hard Disk 0 Not Found
Primary Hard Disk 1 Not Found

Not good. Even as a secondary drive, it causes the primary drive not to be recognized.

Next I had Blake from Colorado Support take a look at it. He’s very good and very trustworthy. No dice.

So, all my data files are safe – my photos, my client files and websites, household files, etc.

However, I don’t have a recent back up of my Outlook PST file. I thought I had done a back up in April (when I got the error for the first time), but I can’t find it anywhere. The only back up I can find is from 11/17/07. So I’m basically out the last 6 months of emails.

CRAP.

I could also use a copy of my WS_FTP ini file and my Firefox profile (with saved passwords and form entries), but those are less critical.

So, there are hard drive recovery services that charge a minimum of $1000, and often much more, to open up the hard drive in a clean room in an effort to retrieve lost data. I can’t afford that. That’s crazy. Particularly for 1-3 files.

I’m going to follow up on 2 more leads locally, then I’m going to look into a cheapie option from Comprehensive Computing in Virginia. Worse case, no data. Best case, I get my Outlook file back for $75.

Whew! My luck’s gotta turn around here soon!