A few weeks back, my computers power supply decided it had had enough of doing its job, and quit. In a loud and smokey fashion no less.

For some reason I am unable to fathom, my motherboard, 2 hard drives, 1 out of 4 PCI cards, all RAM sticks, and the floppy drive all died. How can only 1 of 4 PCI cards die? anmd more importantly, how can 2 of 6 hard drives fail and the others are untouched?

It was time to order new parts. So, my boss in his infinate kindness, orders me the parts I need to get me back up and running.

After a couple of weeks of screwed up deliveries and missing items on the order, I finally got the parts and set about putting them together.

After switching back on and repairing windows (which took some hours to do) I figured out which hard drives I had lost. My design drive, and my personal drive. Stupidly, I backed up neither of them.

Now I have the task of trying to ressurect these drives. I have a few options. I could take them to a data retrieval company, but I refuse to pay those prices. So I am left with the DIY options.

• Put the drive head into another (working) hard drive
• Buy the EXACT same model drive and swap the logic board over, incase the circuit board is damaged

I will post the results here later next week when I should have hoefully retrieved my data from these drives.