Last week, I received a call from a friend that had a friend that needed some help with their computer. Well, I typically don’t work on home computers, but I do help out friends and family with their computers. Let’s call this person “Bill”. Over the weekend, Bill’s computer was running very slowly, had a number of pop-up windows appearing on his screen and his anti-virus couldn’t update. He figured he had a virus so he called a local Houston computer repair technician from the “Squad” to come out and fix his computer.
The computer technician that arrived, saw the same things that Bill did so he rebooted the pc and inserted his “Squad” CD to run some diagnostics and check it for viruses. During the virus scan, he removed an infected system driver file that needed to be removed or cleaned but the computer rebooted with the “Blue Screen of Death”. The error message was right there for the tech to copy and research for a solution, but instead he decided to call it a day and return the next day to see if he can work it out. After about 30 mins, he decided he couldn’t fix the problem and let Bill know that he would have to format the computer, reinstall all the programs and that Bill would lose everything. Bill wasn’t too excited about the idea of formatting the computer since it was really Sandy’s computer (his wife) and she worked on it every day and hadn’t backed up in a while. Luckily for Bill, he couldn’t find his Windows CDs, so he would have to check with his wife to find the CDs and get the “Squad” tech back out the next day.
Monday rolls around and my friend calls me and tells me the situation that Bill is getting charged $300 to format his hard drive and recover NO data. I met Bill at his office and picked up his home pc, which he brought in that day, and took it back to my lab for analysis. The first thing I did was pulled his hard drive out of his computer, connected it to one of my computers via a USB converter cable, scanned it for viruses and checked it for errors. I then put it back in Bill’s pc and attacked the Blue Screen issue. Once I fixed the Blue Screen issue, it was smooth sailing. I fixed the computer, performed regular maintenance, saved all the data and had it working better than ever.
To recap, before you let computer technicians format your computer and sign you up for computer maintenance contracts, make sure he has tried everything he can think of to retrieve your data. Some computer repair companies only allow their techs to work on a pc for an allotted amount of time so its just quicker for them to format if they can’t solve the issue. If the hard drive is still spinning and still partially booting, then you can still get your data off the drive. Most computer repair technicians are on a schedule, so formatting can sometimes be the quickest solution. Don’t Format, until your data is safe and off the drive.