Last night my entire block lost power for about 3 hours. My computer was on when the power went out so what I did was turn the power strip switch off (to be extra safe) while the power was out so when it came back on it would not cause a surge through my computer.

After the power came back on I turned the power strip on (It has a built in surge protection) and proceeded to turn the computer on, the computer went on for about 2 seconds and turned off right away.

As soon as that happened I began to smell burning plastic and saw smoke come out of the case, I opened the case and saw that the HD was the thing that was smoking I took it out and saw that there was a chip that was totally burned on the chip board.

I called the manufacturer and asked if they can replace that because I don't want to lose all the information on there but they told me that they don't make that model so I can't even buy the same drive and take the new board off to replace the old one.

I don't want to pay one of those data recovery companies because the data on there was not extremely important and that I had most of the important stuff backed up.

The moral of this story is: back up all your dada!
Have a nice day.

Is there coverage from the company that makes your surge protector? Maybe it's the fault of the protector and they are responsible for recovering the data.

Yes, most surge protectos have a guarantee and if you save the receipt they will pay for what ever is lost generally, sometimes some more for inconveiniance. I always save my surge protector receipts.

I am not sure how you are going to be able to recover that information. I just hope the disks were not corrupted. If they were it is very expencive to get a data recovery firm to load that junk onto a new drive. I forgot what it was, but it was several hundred per mb from what I heard.

No, this surge protector is older than Grok. The funny thing is that I have a new one and I did not use it. It has lights that tell me if the protection is on if ground is on and it even has an Audible Alarm. Too late now.

Oh and I have never saved a receipts from one of them.

Damn that sucks.

Look on ebay for a drive that matches.
Replace the board with the one from the ebay drive.
Put the burned board on the ebay drive.
RMA that sucker to the manufacturer.
Drink a beer and kick back playing WoW.

I've done this twice and I think Grok has done it once.

[quote author=Invert link=topic=10130.msg94496#msg94496 date=1105058701]
No, this surge protector is older than Grok. The funny thing is that I have a new one and I did not use it.[/quote]This is a bad thing. I heard surge protectors have an effective lifespan of about a year in most situations. To protect from surges, they use some sort of resister or something that gets burned up when the surge occurs, and in most cases, you get small surges every day that'll use up a little bit of that. Once it's all burned up, you have no more surge protection. If this is true, then a surge protector that is "older than Grok" would most likely be completely ineffective.

[quote author=Thing link=topic=10130.msg94502#msg94502 date=1105063299]RMA that sucker to the manufacturer.[/quote]What's RMA? Google comes up with quite a few different answers...  :(

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RMA.html

I put all my important toys in my website file manager. So I can just use my ftp and get it later.

I've got no dada to back up. Damnit. :(

[quote author=Newby link=topic=10130.msg94611#msg94611 date=1105143592]
I've got no dada to back up. Damnit. :(
[/quote]

You've got 37GB of music though. That'd suck to re-download.

And that is the reason I need money for an external hard drive. ;)

[quote author=krazed link=topic=10130.msg94685#msg94685 date=1105244252]
[quote author=Newby link=topic=10130.msg94611#msg94611 date=1105143592]
I've got no dada to back up. Damnit. :(
[/quote]

You've got 37GB of music though. That'd suck to re-download.
[/quote]
Music is the easiest thing to replace, I'd hate to lose 37GB of personal files and programs.