My daughter's Imac hard drive bit the big one a couple of nights ago, and to my chagrin, her document files had not been backed up for a very long time. The Mac shop popped in a new drive (and I stuck some bonus RAM in there and upgraded to OSX 10.3 in the process.) But they informed me that they couldn't get the data off the old drive. They handed me a brochure for DriveSavers, an outfit I'd heard about.

A phone call told me that recovering the whole drive could cost me as much as $2000 (!) Miracle Max don't come cheap.

Now what? Cold beads of sweat. A lot of college stuff on that drive.

I checked out the hard drive type. ATA100 connector. My Windows PC had an ATA66 hookup that wasn't doing anything (my hard drives at SCSI.) I opened the case, attached the drive, and started it up. The system saw it, labeling the drive by its correct part number. So far, so good, but it didn't show up as a drive on the desktop anywhere.

On a sudden hunch, I went over to the shelf and installed a program called Conversions Plus, a utility that lets a PC read and write Mac disks.

The drive showed up, with the same label as it had on the Imac! The files were all there! You could have knocked me over with a feather. I had to activate a small .exe file in the Conversion Plus directory to allow me to copy them successfully to my PC for examination, but I'm halfway there. I'm going to try to write them on CDs and move them over to the new Imac drive. If the mail files work, I'm in business! Wish me luck, but just getting a fragged Macintosh hard disk to run on a PC is miracle enough for one day.

Going to look into automatic backups that work on Mac networks, too.