Stefan Viljoen schrieb:
> 
> In the olden days on the Apple ][ with CP/M I had three - the grandfather,
> father and son (and holy ghost! :) - I still remember the stomach churning
> dread of those horribly loud floppy drives grinding and grinding and
> then "BDOS ERROR" on the monochrome green-screen... Those were the days!

That reminds me of those Iomega "jaz" drives that were all the rage 10 
years ago. We had two or three "pools" (12 computers each) equipped with 
those where I was studying back then, which were intended for the 
Multimedia students to store their many hundreds of Megs on.

They seemed pretty fancy stuff - until it turned out that they could 
contract a contagious disease, some hardware defect that would cause 
them to screw up the storage media in just the right way to ruin the 
next drive they'd be put into in just the same way...

Praise be to the inventor of the floppy disc that we didn't see /that/ 
in the days of the 3.5"-HD FDD!

>> If it's not...I dunno.  Data recovery places are expensive, and I don't
>> know if I can justify $1000+ even on the ~year's worth of data I had, at
>> the moment.  How time-critical are these kinds of things?  Can I just
>> keep it and when I have more money in a few months send it to a data
>> recovery place, if I can't get it working myself?
> 
> Not sure, but I think the quicker you do it the better the results you might
> get? 

I guess it depends. If the original fault would be a broken airseal, 
you'd probably want to get the data out ASAP, before dirt can accumulate.

If the thing is still airtight, I don't think it makes any difference 
whatsoever. In their all-metal casings, HDDs can keep their data for 
quite a long time, and their only worthy adversary is particulate matter 
of any size.

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