Hot Tub Forum
General => General info Somewhat hot tub related => Topic started by: Gomboman on October 22, 2006, 02:01:49 pm
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My primary hard drive crashed last week. I have a backup hard drive installed in my PC but I lost about six months of backup data--mostly digital photos.
I took it to a local PC repair shop but they didn't have any luck restoring the data. They said my hard drive is mechanically functional but it has a boot sector failure.
The PC technician told me to go to Drive Savers. He said it would be about $700 to restore my data--ouch. Do I have any other options before I re-format my drive?
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Typically with boot sector failures you can put the drive in as a second drive somewhere else and copy the data off. I would assume they tried that. Datac recovery places to charge about that much or more.
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Typically with boot sector failures you can put the drive in as a second drive somewhere else and copy the data off. I would assume they tried that. Datac recovery places to charge about that much or more.
No, I tried that before I sent it in. I think it's going to take a higher level of repair. The disk won't even respond to the System Repair through Windows. The technician said that it will have to be opened in a Clean Room to salvage the data. I'm not sure how sharp he is. I think he was a year out of high school. I'll probably have to take it in somewhere else for a second oppinion.
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Gomboman,
I've had some success with Steve Gibson's SpinRite. You can find it at http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm. This product has been around since 1988. Originally, just for FAT but now also NTFS formatting. For a new user, it costs $89 so it's not cheap but it has been useful at home and work.
Phil
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If it's a boot sector failure you should be able to pull data off it as a second disk. 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
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I have seen the fridge thing work. Our IT guy at work does it all the time.
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If it's a boot sector failure you should be able to pull data off it as a second disk. 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
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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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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?
XP Workstation Original Version. Any suggestions on a decent external hard drive that I can purchase for next time? My system is old--3 years old. My bootable drive is a 80GB EIDE drive.
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I would suggest a Western Digital HD. Stay with the firewire as I think your PC's USB's will be to slow to hack the speed. Check this link out
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2204138&Sku=W10-3008
Good luck!
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gombo, campsalot,
Cnet did a review of these not too long ago:
[link]http://reviews.cnet.com/Western_Digital_MyBook_Premium_Edition_500GB_External_Hard_Drive/4505-3186_7-31793438.html[/link]
Super fast read speeds but not so good write speeds, maybe not the best for a backup drive.
I bought a couple of them for my kids when they went to college. Good for storing files that need fast read speeds (video, music), but with a backup drive you would be writing more than reading so maybe not the best.
Steve
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Sorry, but I cannot recommend the Western Digital external drives. Hopefully, they have improved over the last few years.
I purchased one a few years ago and within 30 days, it crashed. Fortunately, I hadn't backed up anything to it that I didn't have another copy of. I returned it to the manufacturer and they provided me with a new one.
This one seemed stable so we copied more than 30 websites along with all the original artwork to it. It crashed within 60 days. I took the drive to a data recovery place and they were unable to recover anything. It cost me several hundred dollars just to let them try the different methods of recovery and still they could not recover it - everything was lost.
Now I just back up everything to several different places. I figure my odds are pretty good that not all of them will crash at once.
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and of course the safest approach might be to get a dual layer DVD recordable drive and backup to DVD. You can then put the DVD's in a safe place. Not as automatic as a backup hard drive but as vlady points out even your backup HDD can fail.
Steve
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Really I would suggest a hard drive in a aluminum enclosure with the fan. The reason I did not suggest this to Gombo was because of the cost. Then mount and unmount the drive when you wanted to back up.
I have never had an issue with a Western Digital drive. However, I never had an external drive like I suggested to Gombo. The ones I use are as I described above which I back up over a network to a Linux box. Probally a lot more than Gomboman needs.
I would not go the DVD route becasue of the number of DVD's it would take. Also, that makes backing data up a real pain. :(
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Agreed campsalot, DVDs are somewhat of a pain but relatively cheap and safe. At least the dual layer DVD's will give you about 9gb of storage per disk. I think gomboman said he has an 80gb primary drive so that's not too much data.
I have used more than 10 western digital drives in various systems I have built over the years and also never had a failure.
But if anyone out there is really looking for the solution you may want to look at a mirrored raid array. A mirrored raid array is constantly keeping two sets of disk drives in sync, so if any one drive fails the backup disks take over while you swap out the bad drive. Buffalo technology makes a pretty popular version in their Terastation products (www.buffalotech.com).
I just saw that western digital has also come out with a dual drive 1 terabyte mybook, that supports either mirrored raid or striped raid.
I have been looking at options for my media center pc. I need upwards of a terabyte of storage for my home videos, music and photos. Not sure yet whether I want to go with something like the terastation or just a couple of big external drives.
Good luck gomboman, hope you find the solution that works for you.
Steve
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You can "roll your own" external hard drive for less money than buying one off the shelf. In addition to saving money, you can get some very useful backup software & have the size & specs you truly want - not just what's available at the moment.
For a solid backup dirve on a budget:
This enclosure (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817155601) + This drive (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144309) = 250GB external drive for ~ $115 with some good software.
Compare to this one from BestBuy (http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=7832599&type=product&productCategoryId=pcmcat33200050002&id=1142296200334) that costs $25 more, has no fan, and no good backup software.
I have a fanless, mostly plastic external enclosure on my other drive. It does what it should, but its very hot. I'd recommend going with aluminum and a small fan in the enclosure. You'll pay a little more, but you could also extend the drive's useful life a few years.
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good point badval, but the 250gb mybook is selling for $83 at Dell's site and for $80 at my local office depot (with $70 rebate).
Steve
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You can "roll your own" external hard drive for less money than buying one off the shelf. In addition to saving money, you can get some very useful backup software & have the size & specs you truly want - not just what's available at the moment.
For a solid backup dirve on a budget:
This enclosure (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817155601) + This drive (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144309) = 250GB external drive for ~ $115 with some good software.
Compare to this one from BestBuy (http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=7832599&type=product&productCategoryId=pcmcat33200050002&id=1142296200334) that costs $25 more, has no fan, and no good backup software.
I have a fanless, mostly plastic external enclosure on my other drive. It does what it should, but its very hot. I'd recommend going with aluminum and a small fan in the enclosure. You'll pay a little more, but you could also extend the drive's useful life a few years.
OK, I never thought about rolling my own. You're saying you can buy an internal drive and install it in an external case? Is there an advantage to having an external drive versus having a slave drive installed within the case for backups?
The drive that failed was a Western Digital Caviar 80GB IEDE drive. My six year old daughter was playing an old Windows 95 game and turned the power off without shutting down properly. When I went to reboot the drive was toast.
Would a mac have crashed like this? I can't believe my wife still wants to spend 1K to restore the data. She never once looked at the digital photos that we lost......
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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
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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
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Is there an advantage to having an external drive versus having a slave drive installed within the case for backups?
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 ;)
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Seagate, Western Digital, whatever. It's all the same.
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.
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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.
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Go for it Gombo! Keep us posted. This string has been fun. Maybe we could get the MOD to ad a weekly "Gizmo's with Gombo" tech forum. LOL! I like the sound of that.