CPR For Your Computer's Hard Drive

It started out like any other day. Sit down at the desk, fire up the computer, and get down to -- huh?

"DISK READ ERROR. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del."

Something was seriously wrong with the computer, CBS Sunday Morning contributor David Pogue recounts.

Now, I'm not the first person on Earth to experience a total hard drive meltdown. It happens to thousands of people, every day. It happened to the computer manager for the Minnesota Twins, John Avenson.

"It started squealing like a pig. Unfortunately, once you hear that clicking noise, it's pretty much done for," Avenson says.

It happened to a writer for "The Simpsons," Bill Oakley.

"I couldn't begin to remember what was on there, I just knew everything was on there," Oakley recalls.

And it happened to Gene Rupp, a consultant who designs industrial equipment on his computer at home.

"It said, 'Hard drive not found' and then I started listening to my computer and it's like, I hear a little noise, it's not like a transmission going out on a tractor or something," Rupp says.

Of course, I'm not some amateur. I'm a professional technology journalist. I have experience. I have tools. I have -- exactly the same problem.

I was desperate. And when you're desperate, there is a last resort for people who absolutely, positively have to get their computer files back.

It's called a data-recovery company. It's a service as specialized and high-tech as a hospital and almost as expensive. But they boast a 90 percent success rate in recovering files from dead drives.

Kelly Chessen used be a counselor for a suicide hotline. But at DriveSavers, her job is to calm down customers who have lost their cool along with their data.

"Having your hard drive fail could mean that you've, you're gonna lose your job, your job's on the line. Maybe your business just went down. It could be as simple as you just had the first two years of your child's pictures -- baby pictures on that drive, but they were sitting on that computer only and now they're gone. So, you've lost all those memories," Chessen explains.

As I took my dead hard drive across the country for its appointment with DriveSavers, I wondered what could have gone so horribly wrong inside that tiny little box.

"If you want to imagine a record player with a needle, that's what your drive looks like inside," one operator tells Pogue.

The hard drive is the heart of your computer. It holds every one of your files, folders and photos. If you take the lid off, you see this: A little high-tech record player. Delicate silver platters spinning at thousands of revolutions per minute. And the little fragile reading arms dancing across at 60 miles an hour. Really gives you a feeling of confidence, doesn't it?

"Every hard drive manufactured today will some day die. It's, it's a given," says John Christopher, a data-recovery engineer.

Jim Reinert is an engineer for a competing recovery service, called Kroll Ontrack. "What we have here is a drive that's imaging with a fan blowing on it. Sometimes, drives will perform better at cooler temperatures," Reinert says.

The most extreme cases are brought here to the Ontrack clean room, where even more delicate microsurgical processes can be performed.

In this dust-free environment, technicians can open up your hard drive, clean it by hand, replace any broken parts and surgically copy files off the sick disk. In the process, these workers get an unobstructed view of what's on America's computers.

Does anybody ever say, "I really need my pornography collection recovered?" Pogue asks Christopher.

"Sure. Absolutely," Christopher says laughing, adding, "You know, it's the information (that) is important in many ways. Whatever it is to -- to people it's, it's not our business to judge."

But the most interesting part of the job isn't the data. It's the people who lose it.

"The strangest phone call I ever had was a man who had gotten so frustrated he actually shot his computer," Chessen says.

But nobody has collected as many great stories as DriveSavers owner Scott Gaidano. He's even put together a little dead hard drive museum.

"This is a laptop that was rescued from the bottom of the Amazon River. And the woman, an amateur diver, went down two flights of stairs underwater. Found her state room. Remembered to bring her key, and rescued her laptop, and got it to DriveSavers. And we recovered all the data for her," Gaidano says.

The fragile nature of disks has Gaidano shocked that better methods of saving data have not become more common.

"I'm surprised that there are still hard drives in computers," he says.

Backing up data on alternate disks is the only real solution, Gaidano adds.

Anywhere from $500-$2,500 later, you get to find out what kind of success these data surgeons had. I was about to meet the technician who worked on my hard drive. This was the moment of truth.

"Unfortunately, we got absolutely nothin' for ya. It's dead. Sorry, dude," the technician says jokingly. In truth, all of Pogue's data was recovered.

Thanks to DriveSavers and Ontrack, my files lived on. They'd been granted a second chance at life, on a new hard drive, and a second, second chance, on a brand-new backup drive. I'd seen close up just how fragile the spinning heart of a computer really is and I vowed never again to take its delicate little life for granted.