Don't Panic...

Yeah, right.

I recently bought myself a DVD burner. One of the main reasons I bought it was to do backups. I have been wrestling with the drive and the new software for the last couple weeks or so and today I seemed to be well on my way to burning my first DVDs.

I seemed to be, yessir. You betcha.

Right up until about 1 this afternoon, when I checked to see if it was finished. I noticed the computer was rebooting, which seemed strange. Then I noticed an ugly error message on the screen.

Sometime during the burn of my first DVD, my primary hard drive decided to quit. Oh, it spins up - I can feel the vibrations of the motor - but my BIOS does not identify it properly, and it won't boot. Adding insult to injury, a little web research shows that the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8 series of drives is not the most robust data storage platform.

Crap. Forget simple backups, what I need now is a recommendation for a data recovery service.