SOS Iminant (if not already) hard drive failure.

Hi guys,

I have a problem with my hard drive that I've been waiting for a rainy day to try and get fixed and today (or this week) is the day (or week!).

So the hard drive in my server is about fried. Either 66 or 33 percent of the hard drive is damaged. It is the Seagate barracuda 1tb Hard drive. On it I have used around 600-800 gb and here is its brief history.

This little ol hard drive was originally in the Maxtor central axis network storage server but after 60 gb magically disappeared , I'm not kidding (one day it had like 990-980 gb and the next it was 940-940 gb of space). So I took the hard drive out and put it in a Dell (ill grab the name l8er) and since then it has been running windows home server 2003 with 2 partitions (20 gb for the OS and the rest for other data).

I realized I had a big problem when I left it idle for about 10 min, the system would do a cold reboot and I got a system error saying that no bootable devices were found. So I took it out, put in a static shield case thing, then in a box, and put it on a shelf to fix on a rainy day. A few days ago I booted the system up and it would not accept my password. It was the right one but it simply refused it.

Today I installed Win XP Pro SP3 on the 20gb OS partition and found out that all my data is still. The directories are still there, the files are still there and taking up space, windows recognizes the files extensions and tries to run the with the appropriate program. However, every time I do I get some sort of error saying that the file is not valid or windows does not recognize the file.

I have tried running both recuva and PC Inspector File Recovery 4.0 to see what would happen if I got the files back using one of those programs and got little success. By little success I mean that recuva was able to recover all the data I deleted prior to packing it up.

So does anyone have any advice or suggestions for how I could at least get all my data back?

Thanks in advance for any help! (I have learned my lesson, always back data up in more than one place, the hard way lol)

You can look on youtube for tutorials and so called experts will tell you they no how. But never open a hard drive, it needs to go to a proper tech who can maybe recover the majority of the data. But ofc this is a great expense, but I see it as the only option.

Early last year I had a 500gb Seagate that crashed and I thought I lost the lot, luckily it was a known firmware fault that they fixed for nothing. But Boyo it sounds like u got bad sectors that are spreading like herpes.

This is why buying a large drive is a danger if you have several drives then u lower the chances of loosing all. The other option is when u buy a drive buy 2 and have a mirror setup then if one fucks up it doesnt matter u still have everything.

yeah jake is right, not much you can do other than take it in

i reccomend you set up raid 1 on your next hard drive

that way if one fails, its not a problem

No doubt...I prefer a 0+1 myself,the down side it you will need a minimum of 4 drives or more and a controller card to accomplish this. But there is no substitute for a blue ray for backing up large amounts of data in a fairly hard to damage medium. And blue rays are alot harder to damage than dvd's or cd's.

I keep almost everything backed up,I too learned the hard way and lost about 2/3's of a 13 year collection of music. Otherwise,I also backup on media fire for stuff I use alot and need to access quickly,like my music/vid files and such.

Yeah Jonesey is spot on u need to backup, too many people are putting faith into large drives and Seagate is one of the best but shit does happen.

My advice is if u backup nothing else then backup personal shit like documents, photos, vids etc. Movies and software u can download again, music is important tho it can be hard to memorise 1000s of songs, I would cry if I lost 2/3s of my music like that Jonesey u poor bastard lol.

Most important thing to remember that if ur drive gives u any warning signs, like wierd noises or bad sectors, back that fucker up and ditch it.

Oh and the big one, no Hard Drive warranty covers data recovery!!!!!

DATA RECOVERY IS EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!
ja...3 years ago that happened. Win install went wonky and I lost a IBM enterprise SCSI as well as the Seagate I was installing to(now I disconnect all storage drives when installing). That day will be remembered forever,I did'nt cry but no one wanted to come near me for a week. A foul mood doesnt begin to describe it.

Most of my music isn't available in normal stores and it's usually non copyrighted limited issue releases only,I've only found about 1/2 that I lost in 3 years :S Thankfully more people are starting to post collections around the net again.

One other important thing concerning people beginning to migrate to ssd's.
They have very limited (in comparison to disk type HD's) write cycles. Do your homework when it comes to setting them up. IE: ramdisks for the paging file and other constant read/erase/write file types being seperated to another disk drive. And don't bother w/ anything that doesn't say Intel or OCz on the label.

I have found a solution for you Boyo.

Method: 1) Take 1 Clay Target Launcher and setup on firm ground.

2) Place hard drive in catapult mechanism

3) Load shotgun preferably with a standard bird shot shell,
however a larger buck shot or solid slug will be ok.

4) Release catapult mechanism whilst taking aim and firing at the
target.

5) Assess target and decipher if a repeat of steps 1-4 is required.

Similar to this video below:

I got a better idea

Or,just and those kids think it's bullet proof? Not if you shoot it w/ the gun in my siggy. Very little is bullet proof from that.

jOn3z3y wrote:Or,just and those kids think it's bullet proof? Not if you shoot it w/ the gun in my siggy. Very little is bullet proof from that.

a extreme way to recover the data if u still have the hard drives is to freeze them into a block of ice and then turn them on lol but this is a 1 time thing and only works 1 time

I was tired and did'nt think of it but try connecting the drive to another computer and try Damaged Disk Doctor. Ofc,try to recover the files w/o it 1st. Btw...an fyi that's very applicable. Seagate has been having problems w/ their 750Gb and higher drives. Something about the block structuring and alignments are causing pretty high failure rates.

Another worthy note if any are thinking of investing in a new hard drive. Drives shipped w/ UPS are subject to a 80% more DOA's and much shorter overall lifespan than w/ FedEx or DHL. Just something to think about.

I had a maxtor 1TB fail with about 500g of data on it. I sealed it very well in a few layers of plastic and paper and put it in the freezer for most of a day, hooked it up and copied my data.

Can't find the site that gave me that tip now though.

Jonesey wrote:

"Most of my music isn't available in normal stores and it's usually non copyrighted limited issue releases only"

do you record it in the bathroom?

Jacl wrote:I had a maxtor 1TB fail with about 500g of data on it. I sealed it very well in a few layers of plastic and paper and put it in the freezer for most of a day, hooked it up and copied my data.

Can't find the site that gave me that tip now though.

why bump a old post


and yes it works fine i have had to this twice

Shogun wrote:do you record it in the bathroom?

LOL....nah, I listen to mostly underground dance music like drum & bass,electro breaks and such. The artists only use private independant labels bcuz they want to retain ownership and remix rights. The releases are generally funded by the artists themselves.

Open source music makes it much easier for other DJ's and artists to use samples or specific rhythm patterns w/o having to deal w/ corporate lawyers or the corporations themselves which tend to leave you holding a very small bag of change after their done pillaging your sales from shows and record sales. The people that do this make alot larger percentages,and in some cases equal totals to "contracted" artists on big labels. (i.e. 50 to 75% of the door charge when playing a venue depending on how popular they are ).