Hard Drive Crash

[rebeccajo 14]

In my sons PC.....

THOUSANDS of music files...not to mention homework, research, etc.

Any suggestions on retrieval of data? Wes already tried the sticking the drive in the refrigerator trick...

[rebeccajo 14]

What? No geeks around?

[Marc and Olga 0]

In my sons PC.....

THOUSANDS of music files...not to mention homework, research, etc.

Any suggestions on retrieval of data? Wes already tried the sticking the drive in the refrigerator trick...

*puts on his partial geek hat*

Hmm was it the operating system of total HD failure?

If just the OS is affected you COULD try to attach it to a computer with a functioning OS and grab all that's left, that way.

If it is total HD failure, no ideas...start collecting the music, homework and research again!

[rebeccajo 14]

It was making clicking noises....

[PlatyPius 5]

If the Hard Drive has physically stopped working, there are really only two methods that I know of.

1) Send hard drive to a data recovery center and pay a thousand or so for retrieval of the data.

2) Remove hard drive, put it in the freezer for a couple of hours, remove hard drive from freezer and connect to another computer and copy as many files as possible before it stops working again.

Seriously... if the hard drive has physically failed, the freezer method works about 50% of the time.

Ok, if it's making clicking noises, it has physically failed. So, the freezer method might work.

[rebeccajo 14]

We put it in the Fridge.....try the freezer instead?

[Mirorgate 0]

If the Hard Drive has physically stopped working, there are really only two methods that I know of.

1) Send hard drive to a data recovery center and pay a thousand or so for retrieval of the data.

2) Remove hard drive, put it in the freezer for a couple of hours, remove hard drive from freezer and connect to another computer and copy as many files as possible before it stops working again.

Seriously... if the hard drive has physically failed, the freezer method works about 50% of the time.

yep. sounds bout right. would option #2 first. dont think you really want to go option #1 for music.

[mawilson 2,133]

Try Disklabs...

The cat peed on my laptop...

and other bizarre data recovery disasters

by John Leyden

Published Wednesday 20th September 2006 13:09 GMT

It's not only IT Help Desks that get strange queries and requests. Data recovery

specialists at UK-based firm Disklabs have compiled an illuminating list of the

oddest requests for assistance it receives from the 50,000 cases a year it deals

with involving people needing to get their data recovered.

Disklabs said that recovery of data is nearly always possible, even from the extreme

cases it highlights. "It seems that each year this list gets more and more bizarre,"

Disklabs director Simon Steggles said.

Disklabs top ten data recovery disasters

• My cat urinated on my laptop. Disklabs technicians had to thread gingerly in
  handling a Toshiba laptop which had been urinated on by a client's pet Persian Blue.
  
• It fell off the roof of the car. A salesperson in a hurry placed his laptop on the
  roof of his car, while he placed all his demo products into the vehicle. He forgot the
  laptop on the roof and drove off. He stated: "I was doing about 40mph when I saw it
  in the rear view mirror".
  
• I accidentally drove over it. An MP3 player was the victim of this roadside mishap.
  The client didn't realise that the MP3 player had fallen out of her pocket, and
  accidentally drove over the offending device.
  
• We just sacked the IT manager and he started kicking the server. The IT manager
  wasn't up to the job so he was fired. The man in question threw a wobbler, deciding
  the server had to go before he did. He achieved this by kicking the server until it
  stopped working, causing data corruption and hardware damage to the hard drives.
  
• There was a bit of oil on it. Quite an understatement. One Disklabs' client
  had approximately 120 barrels of crude spilt over his laptop, which was in use on an
  oil rig at the time.
  
• I accidentally threw it out of a window. A student claimed he was 'messing around'
  with his roommate's laptop. But instead of pretending to throw the laptop out of the
  window, he chucked it for real – much to the dismay of his roommate.
  
• She just got stroppy and snapped it in half. A client's wife thought he was
  playing away from home and snapped his mobile in a fit of pique. The phone, a
  Motorola V3 Razor, was literally snapped in half. Disklabs only received one half of
  the phone and was still able to retrieve all the SMS messages and contacts.
  
• The dog has had a go at it. A Staffordshire bull terrier took a liking to its
  owner's camera and bit into it. The memory card inside sustained some damage
  and arrived still wet from dog saliva.
  
• I was showing my friend how to delete data on the spare hard drive, but
  I deleted the wrong one. Enough said.
  
• My wife threw my laptop down a well. Another marital dispute. Excuses
  offered failed to placate an irate wife who took her revenge by throwing her husband's
  laptop into a 60 foot well.
  

Disklabs swears all the anecdotes above come from real jobs undertaken by its data

recovery service. Disklabs was able to save data in all the above instances.

[aidan80 9]

I’ve worked on quite a few computers and seen a number of hard drives in the various stages of the dreaded “clicking sound” illness . From experience a mechanical clicking sound usually (but not always) means one of two things.. the drive is coming close to or actually has died. If the drive isn’t dead and you hear the clicking sound, I strongly recommend hooking it up to another computer/network or running a bootable OS (e.g WinPE/Linux) disk if possible and pulling all files from it. Reasons for this method of death I could only imagine being, wear & tear, power surges/spikes, lack of care.. never running a defrag/scan disk then packing it up with all them big files and working it like a slave until it gives out due to the extra heat and stress it’s been put under.

Short of taking the drive to a clean room, dissecting it piece by piece and checking everything from the motor, voice coil actuator to the head arm to the spindal to find and maybe correct the problem. My advice should you choose to accept it would be to connect the drive to a secondary computer, place it on a non conductive surface on it’s back and or have the drive fixed or tilted at an angle. Ensure that the power is off when moving or attempting to move the drive.

The above method has worked in the past for me, but unfortunately only a few times. I’ve lost quite a number of files myself in the past to faulty hard drives.

Good Luck!

[incanada1234 0]

This happened to me a few years ago. Nothing was salvaged.

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

In the future pick up a portable hard drive to back-up data.

[MrMrsKnight 0]

It was making clicking noises....

We put it in the Fridge.....try the freezer instead?

Sorry.... just thought it was really cute!

[rebeccajo 14]

It was making clicking noises....

We put it in the Fridge.....try the freezer instead?

Sorry.... just thought it was really cute!

Lobster noises?

Oh - the hard drive is toast. Bummer.

[MrMrsKnight 0]

It was making clicking noises....

We put it in the Fridge.....try the freezer instead?

Sorry.... just thought it was really cute!

Lobster noises?

Oh - the hard drive is toast. Bummer.

Yep!

Sorry about the computer though. It happened to us once and my sister almost killed me for losing all of her school stuff + pictures + music! With time he'll forget all he lost.... hopefully not the school stuff though

[GaryC 7]

Same thing happend to me a while back. I had a storage drive (D drive) with all my pictures of Luz, thousands of MP3's and all my tax records. One day it started giving me weird "file not found" errors when I tried to access it. Then it started clicking. I rushed right out and bought a new drive. After my old drive cooled off for an hour it would let me access it long enough to copy a gig or so over to the new drive. I repeated that until I had all 50 gigs copied. Very close call. Now I burn stuff I can't afford to loose to a DVD. That reminds me, I need to back up again!