Computer Crashes

Well I have been trying to get myself together enough to write some kind of blog post for about a week or better now. Here at work on Wednesday of last week first thing in the morning we had a computer hard drive failure & crash. The crash was on our "server" So it was back to hand writing tickets for Wednesday. And of course as slow as we have been last week was not really one of our slow weeks we did have some business here. So it was totally insane we sent the server to a local repair shop. What needed to be done was replacement of the hard drive but I just had to much to do with all my other duties to be able to replace the hard drive and all the while trying to service customers and hand write tickets.

The computer shop we took the server to called late Wednesday afternoon (Computer Enhancement Systems) They said they had the new hard drive installed but could not transfer ANY data from the old hard drive. Let me jump to why we picked Computer Enhancement Systems on their web site they proclaim they experts in data recovery & disaster recovery solutions. Also I have been dealing with them since the mid 90's for some of my personal computer needs. We also have worked on some of their fleet vehicles in our shop.

Needless to say I feel very let down and to be very frank about the issue feel that we were over charged for the services that they did. Basically they charged us over $400.00 to install a new hard drive and do a fresh Windows OS install they did also install a new CD/DVD drive at the time of service. In order to attempt a data recovery they told me that they would have to "Send the hard drive out" and there would be a Min. charge of $200.00 - $300.00 and that would be the charge even to find out no data could be recovered!!!!!!!!!!!!! Back to what their web site says.....

We're experts in:
bullet Data Recovery Forensic Analysis bullet
bullet Information Technology & Onsite Services bullet
bullet Disk Wiping and Data Destruction bullet
bullet Software Solution Developer bullet
bullet Database Implementation bullet
bullet Disaster Recovery Solutions bullet
bullet Web Design and Training

To add insult to things after all the money they charged I still had to spend hours on the phone with Snap-on tech support to get our "point of sale system" and "customer database" re installed! and of course our newest back up (shame on us) was about two weeks old so we lost about two weeks worth of data.


My question is if you are experts in data recovery why would you need to "send the drive out" everything should be done "in house" if you are experts! That would be like my repair shop saying........ We are transmission experts but to rebuild your transmission we would have to send your car to another shop. We do not proclaim to be something we are not on our web site! Needless to say Autoworx or myself will never be using Computer Enhancement Systems again.