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Hard Drive Failure
Posted: Sat Jan 17, 2004 11:36 pm
by McGruff
My HD started making some new noises tonight... then failed completely. Couldn't boot (lots of loud "ker chunk ker chunk ker chunk" from the HD but no action) and guess who hasn't done a backup for a months... CDRW hasn't been working and I've been getting complacent.
Eventually managed to boot into DOS from a CD and, after several tries, got a few core php files onto floppy. You can't imagine how good that feels. Fingers crossed I'll get the rest before the disk chews itself to bits.
Off now to download some info on installing a hard drive. In the future I'm going to have TWO: one for files and another for backups.
Oh Lord, let me get my data off before you take this disk

Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2004 5:25 am
by patrikG
Oh man, that's a nightmare scenario. Had that happen to a friend of mine.
Sorry to hear that, McGruff
I've got a RAID 1 motherboard now with two harddisks, after my old HD made exactly that noise you describe. It wasn't too expensive at all, and I don't have to worry about things anymore

Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2004 7:22 am
by JayBird
if the drive still works, use a program called GetDataBack. The same thing happened to me and i thought i had lost over 30gigs worth of "stuff", but this program got it ALL back!
I have the full program if you can't find it
Mark
Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2004 7:59 am
by Nay
Bech100 wrote:"stuff"
hmmmm.....
im sure you really wanted them back
-Nay
Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2004 1:15 pm
by McGruff
Thanks for the tips & sympathy! It's a stressful time fer sure.
It seems to be working again - at least for the moment - so I'm busy copying the important stuff up to some webspace. If it holds out for half an hour I'll be OK.
Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2004 3:13 pm
by Gen-ik
McGruff wrote:It seems to be working again - at least for the moment - so I'm busy copying the important stuff up to some webspace. If it holds out for half an hour I'll be OK.
I do the same thing after I had a HD crash a few months ago... any important files / websites / PHP code that I've done get's zipped and uploaded to my server... just in case

Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2004 3:37 pm
by McGruff
Gen-ik wrote:I do the same thing after I had a HD crash a few months ago... any important files / websites / PHP code that I've done get's zipped and uploaded to my server... just in case

Yeah I know. I hacked it months ago.

Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2004 4:11 pm
by Straterra
Speaking of hacking..some idiot told me he was gonna root my Windows box...What a moron!
Posted: Thu Jan 22, 2004 5:27 am
by McGruff
Finally got everything I wanted off the disk - even tried sticking it in the freezer for a couple of hours. Don't know if that really helped but thought I'd pass on the tip.
What a pain it is to reinstall W98 - drivers, patches, programs, ISP conn, FTP connection settings, email accounts.. Takes forever. In future I think I'll be saving regular disk images with Ghost.
I'll keep a second copy at work in case the house burns down. A third copy with some friends in case work burns down. A fourth with my aunty in case my friends get kidnapped by aliens. That should cover it.
As Vinnie Jones says, it's been emotional.
Posted: Thu Jan 22, 2004 5:52 am
by malcolmboston
roflmao, in the freezer huh!? well ive never heard of that one before
well funnily enough i have 4 HD's at home all failed
HD1 - 40gb maxtor - No power
HD2 - 7.4gg Samsung - Circuit Board Snapped
HD3 - 4.1gb Seagate - No Power
HD4 - 560mb!! Connor Peripheral - error prone
i know it aint much storage but would of came in quite handy as a raid configuration

my 560mb HD i actually use as a slave to put all my web templates on, you just have to make sure windows doesnt do scandisk!
Coincidentally, i am pretty much a windows fanboy, but i also have redhat 9 which i bought a while ago (£30 omg), i used to use windows XP and experienced system failure on average once a month, now as you can imagine i was'nt the most happy fellow after this so i migrated to windows 2000 pro and have never had any problems, its a very stable operating system
i would migrate to linux only, except for the lack of DW support and games, (wine is not as good as everyone says)
Posted: Thu Jan 22, 2004 6:11 am
by McGruff
I got the freezer idea from a forum somewhere. Apparently it does work, if you're lucky. I guess metal components would shrink slightly and if something is jammed it could get freed up.
You get to a stage where you'll try anything really..
Posted: Thu Jan 22, 2004 6:15 am
by patrikG
I heard that freezer solution for optical storage devices (aka CDs

) - where, if there was a slight scratch, through the material contracting, it could link up and thus repair itself on a particle level.
Problem with cold (or heat) and harddisks is that magnetic fields deteriorate and collapse at some point, thus you'd loose all your data...