Hard Drive Failed - Lost EVERYTHING!

[hyperasus]

I build custom computers and my take on hard drives isn't if they will fail, but when. Not only that, but if you have anything of value on the drive then you need to factor in murphies law. This is why I recommend RAID drives. Get yourself a network drive with built in mirror RAID or RAID 5. It's just not worth losing your data. Almost all of us will go threw this at least once in our life. Only noobs let it happen again. Get yourself a RAID.

You said you just bought a new computer. Make sure that sucker has a least 2 hard drives and that they are mirrored. People can talk big all day long about keeping backups. Thats all great, but in the real world very few have the time or energy to remember to back everything up every time they get new data. Having some redundancy will at least prevent loss from an inevitable drive failure.

On you're laptop that failed, is it just not booting anymore, have you tried putting the drive into another computer to see if you can recover the data? What brand is the drive? Some companies are cooler about helping you recover your data.