>Well, I finally got bitten and I'm kicking myself for being a lazy bastard! the dreadful dead hard drive on my work laptop and... well I do have an old backup online and the most recent backup which would have saved me is on an external hard drive which was probably stolen by one of many people doing some work in my house b/c I can't find it on 3 places that I usually placed it.
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>First, what happened. I got the error "Windows could not start b/c the following file is missing or corrupt: Windows root\system32\" I tried to do a repair with no success, took it to work a coworker tried to repair, he got further but couldn't fix it then we took out the hard drive and attached it to another computer using a USB cable, and initially the computer recognized the drive I even saw the folders and hit CTRL-C to copy the files and then windows explorer froze and the hard drive started doing this clicking sound, after that the best we could do is for device manager to see the drive but not windows explorer, we tried on xp and Windows 7 computers.
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>Now I have 3 questions:
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>1. Does it seem like the drive might be readable maybe using another device? or it seems that it's gone? (especially with the clicking sounds! seems mechanical failure). Maybe a trick to make the drive last a little bit longer? I heard about putting the drive in the freezer lol.
>2. The most important files is a project that I probably have lost 40 hours worth of work, the online backup I have is 1 year old but I've changed the application only a few times since then. Maybe I could extract the code from the executable, what experience using a tool to recreate the code from the exe?
>3. Recommendations on a reasonable priced company for data retrieval as a last resort?
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>What other options do you guys see?

Try hard to find the backup drive you think is lost or stolen, maybe it just got moved somewhere while someone was doing work. Even offer a worthwhile reward e.g. to your kids, give them some incentive to find it. Maybe that would cause the drive to magically "reappear" if it did "grow legs" i.e. nudge a handyman's memory so to speak.

The freezer idea is actually proven and might work for you. If it's on a USB cable you could keep it in the freezer (or fridge part) while it's in use which might keep it cool enough long enough to retrieve your data.