Everybody's dead Dave
My computer's hard drive is no more. It is a dead hard drive. It ceases to function.
It died last Friday night and it refuses to let me get my files off it.
Since I am not willing (or indeed able) to pay £700+ for a professional data recovery of the drive this is a summary of the situation:
Not too bad:
- Operating System annihilated. Well I needed to re-install anyway and I just love re-installing Windows (or at least it seems that way).
- All website works-in-progress wiped. Fortunately given the nature of web work, most of it was backed up on the Dreamhost web server ?
Bad:
- Entire mp3 collection wiped. I have a year-old backup of this so could be worse. It's given me a good reason to re-encode my CDs in .ogg format instead though.
- Games directory annihilated. Most can be re-installed no problem, but lost the FF7 saves that I made to help research for ffseven.com.
-
Applications installs / hardware drivers / Windows updates etc. lost (and backups a bit too old to be of use). It's amazing just how much I need to install to have a computer that I can actually use:
- VIA Chipset drivers
- nVidia drivers
- Updated SoundBlaster drivers
- mIRC
- Nero
- Mozilla
- Apache
- PHP
- MySQL
- MySQL-Front
- PuTTY
- TortoiseCVS
- WinSCP
- LeechFTP
- UltraEdit
- Winzip
- Winamp
- CDex
- DivX codec
- 20+ MB of Windows security updates
- Serial numbers for certain programs (eg. UltraEdit, mIRC) lost.
Very bad:
- Some nostalgic stuff (eg. old DOS programs that I wrote in Pascal 6 years ago, photos, screenshots of early versions of Voidwars) lost.
- Local e-mail archive lost. This archive contained all e-mails received over the past 2 years. No backup.
- Everything I'm having to re-download I'm having to do over a 56k modem.
So if you're wondering why I haven't done the export of the Galactic Report from the Voidwars dev game yet, now you know why.
Posted: 2003-04-14 07:36:38 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (1) | Comments (10)
Comments
Freaky (2003-04-14 09:18:01 UTC)
Suck. What was the failure mode? You can sometimes recover temporarily from sticktion (where the head sticks to the lubricant on the landing zone on the platter) by giving the drive a short, sharp tap to the top, and fried electronics can sometimes be overcome with those from an identical drive enough to get some information off.
What make/model was it, btw?
Xiven (Registered) (2003-04-14 12:19:12 UTC)
It was a Maxtor 4K060H3 otherwise known as a 60GB DiamondMax 540X.
"Failure mode"? What do you mean? It pretty much just stopped working, to the point that the BIOS has trouble recognising it (it works just about if I attach it as slave on the standard IDE interface and reboot a few times) and the Powermax tool from Maxtor won't even touch it (can't remember what error code it gave).
I'm not too desparate to get the data back, what I am most concerned about is getting a replacement drive from Maxtor (and if I start shaking it about, they might decide to reject it as "excessive shock").
Kamakaze (2003-04-21 08:24:20 UTC)
Yes hard drives dying is annoying
Tim Scarfe (2003-04-26 17:45:31 UTC)
RAID is a great thing. Buy 2 disks (RAID 0) and get your ass familiar with the Computer Management/Disk Administrator screen!
Xiven (Registered) (2003-04-27 05:07:52 UTC)
Yes I agree RAID mirroring is a very nice thing. In fact my motherboard has a built-in RAID controller (so I would use that instead of the Windows software method). The only issue is that it requires me to buy another hard drive...
Tim Scarfe (2003-04-30 13:20:07 UTC)
Erm, Yep. Is that a problem?
Tim Scarfe (2003-04-30 13:21:51 UTC)
Ohh, and while I'm here; I meant RAID 1, not 0. Must have been in a coma when I commented!
Xiven (Registered) (2003-04-30 16:12:53 UTC)
Actually it's not a problem...
Anonymous (2003-08-06 07:57:10 UTC)
You may be able to change the logic board.
Check this out :
http://www.deadharddrive.com
Tim Scarfe (2005-08-09 14:55:29 UTC)
Hey! just wanted to say hi to my name twin...see above....hello!