The motherboard in my computer is bad and I doubt I'll be able to recover anything else from the hard drive. So far our emails for service have been ignored. With everything we've had going on I've put off trying to reach anyone by phone, figuring I'll spend hours on hold before finally reaching someone that I can't understand. I'll work on that next week when I have more time - and hopefully patience.
Update, 31 Dec - John contacted Gateway again because MPC wasn't responding. They informed us that they are sorry we're having trouble with MPC. MPC is in Chapter 11 but we still must deal with them.
So I've commandeered one of John's spares. Having a husband that buys and repairs old laptops as a hobby comes in handy at times like this.
I've been finding lots of information about my Graham line so tonight I decided to load Family Tree Maker 2008 so I could enter information while it's still fresh. I had backed up my FTM 2005 files so after I had 2008 loaded I put in one of the backup Cd's. I got an error message that .fbc files weren't supported! #^$#@!##&*!!!!
I had backed up my FTM files to the external hard drive just before my computer died and they were backed up with the .ftw extension and transferred OK. But I did experience several minutes of panic thinking that I'd lost all my files.
If you use Family Tree Maker be sure to make backups of all available file extensions and then throw in a gedcom besides!
There were a few files that I had not backed up, some obituary transcriptions and some census images. They will be easy to recreate so I'm in good shape I think.
3 comments:
Yikes. I'm glad you got most of your data retrieved. Is there anything more frustrating than computer problems? (maybe car problems, but it would be very close--we rely on them both so much!)
Do you have a friend who is an IT whiz, works for a computer store, etc? They often have something called a USB Enclosure that can connect your old hard drive and capture files to another drive (either on a new computer, or on another computer to transfer to your computer.
A data recovery service can do this too, but it can be expensive.
My son-in-law is an IT director for a school district and does this all the time. He helped me out two years ago when my HD crashed.
If it was your motherboard that was bad, then your hard drive should be OK. You might even be able to connect it to another computer and use it, or at least download files from it.
Cheers -- Randy
Tex - I got my car back Friday. My son's brakes went Saturday so he has mine now because our mechanic closed up shop for the week! I do think the problems with the computer are more frustrating for me.
Randy - John has a USB enclosure otherwise called that thingamabob for hard drives! We did try that and it won't let us retrieve anything. So we figured it was a hard drive problem after all. Then we tried to install a new hard drive and got the lines that we associate with Gateway motherboard failures - this is far from our first. I did try to fix the problem originally and I may have messed up the hard drive as the motherboard problem caused it to reboot in the middle of the process.
Thanks for the tips. We may get something off it yet.
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