Daughter's hard drive crashed!!

Parent Cafe
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<p>I feel so bad for her; she had three lab reports and part of a midterm paper saved. Of course the labs are due today and the HD crashed yesterday afternoon. She has now learned a hard lesson about saving work; it seems that she can save to the schools server, as well as her hard drive, which she will be doing from now on. Dell is sending a new hard drive next day along with all the disk she will need to install onto the hard drive. This is not my computer savvy kid so I am hoping that IT will give her a hand with this.</p>

<p>Here’s my question-Should she expect the lab professor to give her an extension? She emailed him last night to let him know what happened and said she was going to IT when they open this morning. There is a slim chance they might be able to get her documents off; that is a very slim chance. She wanted to know if she should start over last night recreating the labs or wait until this morning to see if they can be retrieved. She is a bit streesed this week with mork work that usual and was hoping not to redo the labs, or at least get an extension. The professor’s reply was “Do the best you can.” What does that mean? She didn’t know what to do so she decided to redo two of the three as that was all time would allow. In her original email she did say that she understood that she would be given a lower grade for work turned in late. I think she was hoping for some pity from the professor and wishing he would say, “Turn it in late and don’t worry about losing points.” She wasn’t that lucky!</p>

<p>Sorry, I just needed to vent a bit. It is hard when we are so far away; I feel helpless. Not that there would have been anything I could have done even if she was at home other than calm her down and help with the computer. She was so upset that she had to deal with Dell on the phone, she was late to a class due to being on the phone, the weather was crappy, she was tired and cranky-just not a good day.</p>

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<p>Where does she go to school? Even the little computer support department at my son’s school was able to quickly install a new keyboard that Dell had sent my son and got him back up and running. Hopefully, your daughter will bring her stuff over to that office and they will fix it for her. </p>

<p>Look at all the great lessons she’ll learn from this one little experience:</p>

<p>While a hard drive crash can be truly catastrophic, she’ll be much more aware of the importance of backing up files. </p>

<p>She’s learned how to haggle with tech support over the phone, and get what she wants.</p>

<p>She’ll learn to seek out experts who know how to fix things.</p>

<p>She’s learned how to negotiate with her professor (hopefully, successfully).</p>

<p>She’s reinforced her belief that she has a family she can count on to hear her out.</p>

<p>She’ll learn that this too shall pass.</p>

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<p>“Do the best you can” sounds as if the prof is willing to give her an extension if she needs it. My S’s computer crashed recently. Dad was able to restore it by running a recovery software program. It took a while but it is now back up. If this is what is needed, she would only need at most a day’s extension.</p>

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<p>There is a very good chance that the files can be recovered. Hard drive failures are mechanical. The data should still be intact.</p>

<p>I recommend considering a USB flash drive as a backup. You can backup a lot of data on a 1 gig flash, but it won’t go very far for graphics or music files.</p>

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<p>edad- Guess what I put as #1 on my to do list last night :slight_smile: Of course that was before I knew she could save to the school’s server, but I figure she should have something else as a back up. For my son last year we got him a small portable external hard drive. He has all his music on there so as not to clutter up his internal HD and I had thought about one for my daughter for Hanukkah for her music and photos. I figure she can also save her work to the external hard drive as well as the internal. What are the chances both HD’s will fail at the same time; on second thought, with my daughter’s luck they would both go together :-(</p>

<p>I spoke with the tech at school; this isn’t the regular IT for school but a private company that happens to be Dell certified. How convient that he is across the quad from daughter’s dorm! He thinks he should be able to retrieve the files and reinstall all onto the new HD when it arrives today. He isn’t 100% sure, but he is trying. I believe he was able so far to get the lab reports; that was the immediate concern. </p>

<p>So, all that might have been lost was a nights sleep for my daughter while she stayed up and redid some of her labs. That’s the great thing able college; she will just hop back into bed this afternoon and then complain that she didn’t get any work done and will need to stay up all night tonight!</p>

<p>My fingers are crossed that she doesn’t have to take a grade deduction on these labs.</p>