General > General info Somewhat hot tub related
My Hard Drive Crashed
cooltoy2000:
I have seen the fridge thing work. Our IT guy at work does it all the time.
Gomboman:
--- Quote --- Â If it's a boot sector failure you should be able to pull data off it as a second disk. Â If that's not the case you have a controller error/failure or a head failure/crash.
 If the BIOS detects it, you may be able to use SpinRite and recover data.  I've had decent luck with it.
http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm
 $700 seems fair.  The last time I had to use a recovery service like that it cost $1000 for a 60GB laptop hard disk.  They were able to recover everything.
 I've heard of some ghetto hackers being able to recover data in situations like these by placing the drive in a ziplock bag then putting it in the freezer over night.  Hook it up while its still cold, pull the data off it, then put it in the garbage. Also, sometimes you can get the disk to read if you place it upside down before powering it on.  Regardless, the best thing to do is not use it until you have a recovery plan in place.  You'll have to decide if the value of the data is worth ghetto or pro.  I'm not responsible either way! ;D
--- End quote ---
I went back to the PC store today to find out what exactly they did. This is what was in their notes file. The technician who did the work was off.
1. Ran hard drive test. Both drives are good, but we can't get any data off of the primary drive due to the OS being corrupted.
2. Unable to to run a windows repair on the unit.
3. Transfered data files off slave drive to backup. Re-installed OS on slave drive and made it the bootable drive. Transfered data files back onto working drive.
The person who I talked to today also suggested freezing the hard drive. I laughed when I heard about the freezing method. I'm curious how that would work?
The BIOS doesn't recognize the drive. I still can't read off it either with my new drive working correctly. When it's set as a slave drive I get an error that the disk is bad and then it goes through a check disk routine.
My wife wants to murder me for not backing up our data. I'm ussually pretty good but I got lazy. Learn from my mistake and backup your data please. Thanks for the help.
wmccall:
I can see two possible reasons for the freezer to work.
1. Electronics that fail when warm.
2. The drive platters or heads are warped and cooling may contract them so that the drive spins ok, at least for awhile.
jeremy:
--- Quote ---The BIOS doesn't recognize the drive. Â I still can't read off it either with my new drive working correctly. When it's set as a slave drive I get an error that the disk is bad and then it goes through a check disk routine.
--- End quote ---
If the BIOS doesn't recognise it, it's probably the controller and freezing probably wont help. You may be able to buy the same model drive off Ebay, swap the controller board, and give it a go. That would be the first thing a drive recovery place would try. As long as the drive doesn't click/squeel/whine it might work.
You may want to consider setting up a disk mirror. 2 drives and a RAID controller and you won't have to worry about backups.
Campsalot:
Gomboman I would suggest you get your self a good external hardrive and firewire it to your PC and do mirror image backups. This makes a mirror image (aka duplicate copy)of your main hard drive.
Curious? What was our OS on th old drive? Was it an original version or a upgrade to that OS?
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