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Did I ask you to scrape a site for me last week via Skype?

...

Last week I posted an ad for developers and met around 5 or 6 new people who each started working on different projects for me.

THEN, my hard drive failed and I lost access to my Skype ID and lost these new Skype contacts.

One of these people (sorry can't remember which of you it was), was asked to do a site scrape, to pull down certain files off a certain site.

If that was YOU please get in touch again via PM as I have lost my old Skype ID, thanks.

can't you recover your skype password?

Yes it's technically possible if I follow these steps:

Step 1. Pay $2400 to a hard drive recovery company to retrieve my data.
Step 2. Look at my skype password.

Seriously, I did try password recovery but couldn't because I no longer have access to the email address which I used to sign up to Skype, and the reason I don't have access to that particular email address any more is because... my hard drive failed.

I back up a lot of stuff (95% of it usually), but got caught out this time by the last 5% that wasn't.

I'm thinking that this person I'm looking for might have been 'error'... I'll PM him :)

Given your hard drive got errors that's quite possible.

Hard drives rarely fail completely and without warning. Have you tried any methods of recovering the data off of there?

I stared at it for a while and called it an asshole, but it still didn't work.

There's absolutely no noise coming from it though, no loose parts, which makes me think that even if I did get a pro company to recover it, it would more likely be at the low end of the range, more like $500. Possibly just bad circuit board or something like that.

I've actually decided to take it in to one of these companies tomorrow for a free quote, along with several others that I've collected over the years. Hopefully they'll give me a bulk discount.

If you have access to a Linux box, you could image the readable space using dd_rescue and then try recovering data using various software programs.  If the filesystem was NTFS, I've had good luck with GetDataBack.  It was able to recover all of my wife's important files after her hard drive failed.

What if the BIOS refuses to believe it even exists?

If it takes the usual amount of time to POST then it sounds like the circuitry is having issues -- in this case a data recovery shop should have no trouble extracting the platters and putting them in another drive enclosure.

If it takes a long time to POST, then the drive might be trying to spin up and calibrate itself, and this could be failing.  You could always try the freezing trick and see if that helps.  (I've had successes with that in the past.)

It takes a long time to POST.

I've also had success with freezing drives before (for one last shot at copying data before failure), but don't want to risk it with this one.


I don't think any of this applies; It's obviously a program for software issues.

No, it's not.  :)  If you can get a partial image (by skipping bad sectors) then the software may be able to reconstruct the master file table and extract undamaged files.  This assumes, of course, that the BIOS recognizes the drive.  In my wife's case, the BIOS did, but the first 11GB of sectors were unreadable.  The rest of the drive was mostly intact and this was enough for the software to recover files.  It won't work in every case, of course.

But yes, if you are worried about damaging the drive further, it would be best to leave it to the professionals.

I've heard SpinRite from grc.com works well to recover a completely failed drive, but I don't know of anybody personally who has used it. It also costs $$$.

Don't use spinrite, or any software, if you suspect possible partial failure of circuitry or heads. Software could cause more damage. Spinrite is great for recovering data from weak sectors when everything else is fine.

For professional data recovery, I recommend Gillware. They will evaluate your drive for free, and even go as far as recovering your data and showing you what they found, before asking for payment. They charged me about $700 to recover a 250gb laptop drive. As far as I know, the heads failed. All data was intact.

Thanks, I'm in Aus, taking it in to "Payam Data Recovery" today.

Don't look at me. I never got any response to my attempts to contact you via Skype.

I did respond. I wrote quite a lot of text, but was then left feeling like you didn't respond as I guess it never went through. Feel free to get in touch on the new one, if you still want to do some work. Thanks.

I think the take-away lesson here is that Skype is not reliable. I would suggest finding another communication method. :)

Care to suggest one? Is there any way of having a truly encrypted live chat, without even Skype staff listening in?

Take a look at TorChat.

Never used it but... http://pidgin-encrypt.sourceforge.net/

Wait, you were using Skype because you thought your stuff would be safely encrypted?! You do realize that Skype cannot be trusted for secure communications, right?

As for chatting, there's TorChat as mentioned before, as well as OTR and maybe a few other things I don't have handy.

Pidgin-Encryption is weak, not deniable, etc. Try out Off The Record. http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/

Yes that was the original reason I got 'duped' into using Skype 5 years ago, then just stuck with it.
I know it can't be trusted so that why I ask what can be trusted. Thanks for the suggestions!