>>>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.
>>>
>>>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.
>>>
>>>Now I have 3 questions:
>>>
>>>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?
>>>
>>>What other options do you guys see?
>>>
>>>Thanks!
>>
>>I had this happen a few years ago so you have my sympathy. I wound up taking it to a data retrieval service and they were able to recover some, but not all, of the data. It was a virus that took out the external backup drive as well as the C: drive. About half my data was lost forever. As you might imagine, I am now a zealot about backup, both local and online (Carbonite).
>
>
>Now that will make 2 of us, local, external drive and online AND let some hackers in so if all failed at least they have a copy!

No need for that, the government's got it all anyways: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2013-09-06/ (and a few subsequent strips)