General > General info Somewhat hot tub related
My Hard Drive Crashed
Cola:
try looking for a file called found000, found001, etc.
This happened to me last year and I lost nothing.
Pull the drive and mount itt into another PC
it should be the d or e drive there
see what comes up
good luck
Steve
geekd:
I've lost hard drives in the past, and it sucks.
I can't give you advice on how to retrieve your lost data, but I can answer some questions about hard drives.
Seagate, Western Digital, whatever. It's all the same. One is not better than the other. After 5 years or less, they will die. They will all die. (sorry - drama off).
Buy a approx $30 external IDE hard drive case, aluminum would be nice. USB. Buy the biggest regular IDE hard drive you can afford. Buy the one with the best price per Gig of storage. Brand doesn't really matter. Since it's a backup drive, RPM and cache or any of that other crap doesn't really matter either. You're going to be accesing it through a USB port, that's going to be your bottleneck, not drive RPM.
It's pretty easy to put the 2 together, and when you plug it in, Windows should recognise it no problem. Then just copy your important stuff to it once a week or so. It might fail, or your main drive might fail, but what's the odds they both fail at the same time?
The advantage to an external drive like I sugest above is that it's easy to move from computer to computer. Also, it has it's own power supply, so if your daughter turns the machine off, only the internal drive(s) will get thier power yanked, the external drive will be fine.
Would this have happened on a Mac? Yes. Harddrives DO NOT like it when the power suddenly goes away. These days they are much better about it, but they still don't like it.
-geekd
badval:
--- Quote ---Is there an advantage to having an external drive versus having a slave drive installed within the case for backups?
--- End quote ---
Yes, there are many advantages.
The drive should last much longer (theoretically) because it's only powered on when you need it.
It's not taking up space inside your case, could eliminate 1 IDE ribbon cable, and is not generating heat inside your case. All of these things should help (a little) reducing overall internal temperature, which could extend the life of other components.
It's portable. Truly plug & play so you can easily move massive amounts of data to different machines.
Keeps old technology useful. The newest Intel motherboards only support one IDE cahnnel (2 devices) natively and use 3rd party driver for second (if there is a second) channel. Installing IDE hard drives on these systems can get painful. You're either killing it's performance by pairing it with an optical drive (it will slow down to the opical drive's transfer mode even if it's the "master") or you're increasing boot times and introducing possible stability issues running 3rd partysecondary IDE channel like JMicron. Going external, you keep the IDE hard drives out of the system architecture.
The down sides:
Higher cost (because you're paying for the external case too)
Slower transfer rate - only a factor for huge amounts of data
Greater chance to damage the drive - i.e drop the whole thing while moving it, bang something into it on your desk, etc.
I lose those little jump drives all the time. I haven't lost an external hard drive.....yet ;)
badval:
--- Quote ---Seagate, Western Digital, whatever. It's all the same.
--- End quote ---
Mostly true with one huge exception: MDT drives. MDT are "refurbished" drives that come from major manufacturers and are "white labeled" and branded as MDT (Magnetic Data Technology). They're a few bucks cheaper and are a real crapshoot for quality. I tried 4 of them with a 75% fail rate within 1 year. These are factory seconds and were rejected from Seagate/WD/Maxtor/etc process for a reason. Not worth saving a few bucks taking a chance with this brand.
Kind of like spas - everyone has their own opinion on what brand is best. In my experience, Maxtor drives run a little hotter and WD drives fail earlier. Samsung and IBM/Hitachi respond a little slower. Seagate (right now) seems to be the best blend of noise, heat, speed, reliabilty, & cost for standard SATA-II internal drives. YMMV.
Gomboman:
Thanks for all the help. I bought a Seagate 400GB Internal Ultra ATA/100 for $99 at my local Frys store today. The same drive at Bestbuy was $219. I was looking for a smaller drive but this one was cheaper. Now I just need an external case and I'll be set.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version