Wow, the hard drive recovery business must be rather lucrative. But only because people like me don't think to read up on some information before paying for their expensive recovery services.

Like I said before, my 500GB hard drive crashed and burned last week, leaving me with little data backed up. Well, most of the important stuff was backed up, and I had only had a few things that I lost. I bought a new hard drive, and transferred my backups to the new drive. The crashed drive is under warranty and I was planning to send it to Seagate in return for a brand new drive. However, I was a bit wary about sending them a broken drive that still possibly had all my sensitive data on it, so I started reading on the internets about disk repair and data recovery software.

Seagate actually has software that you can download to repair the busted up sectors of a hard drive. I downloaded that and repaired the hard drive, but that left me with an unformatted RAW drive of which I couldn't access in Windows without formatting the entire drive. I found some other software online that allowed me to read the data packets off of a corrupted drive. Not too confident about the software, I installed it and attempted to read the corrupted data. Surprisingly, all the data was still there! I quickly copied all my important data over to the new hard drive last night. There's still some data that I believe I need. Once I get that all copied, I will use the Seagate software to format and completely rewrite all the sectors of the hard drive with blank data so that no one will be able to access my data again.

Yay for the internets.