Aaargh…my TV hard drive crashed.  It wouldn’t register in Windows, and no sound could be heard from it when listened closely.

It just seemed dead to the world.

Turns out I need either data recovery software or data recovery service to recover.

So, I tried a couple of trial data recovery programs but they couldn’t even access the TV drive.

More digging and I found I actually had a hardware failure of the hard drive.  Could be the pcb or drive head.  In any case, I wanted my data recovered asap - the thought of downloading all my TV shows again just depressed me.

I trawled a few data recovery companies / web sites and found 123 Data Recovery to offer a no data recovery / no fee service.  Sounds OK to me.

So I shipped off my hard drive for data recovery recovery.  Within 2 days, all the data was replaced on a shiney new hard drive ready to plug in.  Fantastic, data recovery succesful!  It did cost me close to £180 including the new hard drive but what the hell - the data was recovered and my data had made a full recovery (along with my mental state).

Better backup in future!  Thanks to 123 data recovery for their service, big thumbs up!