i hate computers

[arc]

got home from oulton park yesterday, switch the PC and went to make a brew - came back expecting to see it sat in windows but no. It's sat in the BIOS, with the main hard drive spinning up, clicking, and spinning up, and clicking.

great.. click of death. it's dead. great. thank-you. i hadnt backed up this month yet, so thats a months worth of photos gone - and my entire music collection.

recovery costs weigh in at around £200-£350. thanks Western Digital, thanks a lot!

 

[bulldog5046]

by chance the 80gb WD drive? i got through 8 of them all went back to WD and i got a new one each time right bugger though

 

[Hellcat]

Raid 1 and Raid 5 are both great things...

As is Windows Backup.

 

[arc]

by chance the 80gb WD drive? i got through 8 of them all went back to WD and i got a new one each time right bugger though

nah, 200gb SATA

Raid 1 and Raid 5 are both great things...

As is Windows Backup.

i was meant to be running an array, buying two 300gb drives to hold the backups off a mate of mine - but his main array of 500gb drives died so he kept my drives.

 

[Xen]

WD, IBM, Hitatchi, Maxtor.... wouldnt touch a single one now. Started using seagates about 4 yrs ago, i now use them in every PC i build... They just DONT die!!!

If your careful enough, you can save the data yourself. Buy an EXACT model of the HDD and switch the disc platters over. Be careful though.. slightest bit of dust and you have 2 useless HDDs... can be done if your confident enough though.

 

[Stu DemonD]

My latest Maxtor is exactly the same as a Seagate - this was confirmed when I took my old Maxtor to a data recovery place, with a new Maxtor in hand; they compared it to a new Seagate, no difference - even said Seagate on it.

Bad luck arc

 

[Liam]

Don't they do that in labs though?

Nasty Mark, I had this with a 120GB IDE drive back a while ago, was pants but you get the stuff back.

I'm a Maxtor man.

Liam

 

[Xen]

My latest Maxtor is exactly the same as a Seagate - this was confirmed when I took my old Maxtor to a data recovery place, with a new Maxtor in hand; they compared it to a new Seagate, no difference - even said Seagate on it.

News to me you learn something new everyday.

IME seagate barracuda drives have never let me down *touch wood* so im well impressed with them.

Arc - if worst comes to worst, and you don't want to pay for another drive to risk a platter swap and your not gonna fork out for data recovery. try this... worked for me once when my WD failed with the same symptoms (head servo was knackered, sending the head back to idle position whn it should have been hovering over the platter).... Open up the drive and start the PC, when the head flicks back to its idle position, give it a tap and see if it moves back over the platter. Managed to save loads of docs of a dead 10gb doing this... kinda flukey i guess, but it worked may work for you too.

 

[Xen]

BTW, that was using the dead drive as a slave tho... would take you forever doing it as the boot drive lol

 

[Stu DemonD]

News to me you learn something new everyday.

It also surprised the data recovery guys as well, because they suggested I get a Seagate, even though I had already ordered a Maxtor.

 

[psychofox]

My latest Maxtor is exactly the same as a Seagate - this was confirmed when I took my old Maxtor to a data recovery place, with a new Maxtor in hand; they compared it to a new Seagate, no difference - even said Seagate on it.

Bad luck arc

One company bought the other, so thats why they are the same.

 

[Stu DemonD]

No ****

 

[jug]

WD, IBM, Hitatchi, Maxtor.... wouldnt touch a single one now. Started using seagates about 4 yrs ago, i now use them in every PC i build... They just DONT die!!!

i've only ever used seagate, and i've never once had one fail.

 

[Andy_sx]

i hate computers too, you cant fix them with a hammer and jimmy bar

 

[Ninja59]

To be honest Seagate, but have only had my external one for a few months though, very good so far (please say i haven't cursed it).

 

[JonnyBoy]

This is probably stating the blindingly obvious, and you've probably already done it, but just in case... have you tried using it as a slave drive? Ideally via a USB-IDE/USB-SATA convertor rather than on an internal IDE/SATA port as dodgy drives tend to confuse the controllers

 

[arc]

it's ok people. all is well.

i had fallen out with the computer so hadnt done anything with it until friday. took the working drive out (that i thought was empty). plugged it into another comp via the usb convertor and found all my stuff. ace. It also had a few bits of an old windows install on there too, so i moved it all into a new folder so windows setup wouldnt spot it and have a moan at me. Once that had finished i unplugged it, and windows winged it hadnt written something and data might be lost.

turns out it had lost.. lost the partition table, so my drive which id just found all my stuff on was showing as un-partitioned and very much blank.

great.

enter ontrack easyrecovery. ran that on it, in raw mode and got all my stuff copied onto the other computer. partition the drive, and copied it all back over. put it back in my machine and rebuilt it.

sorted.

 

[Phoenix3dfx225]

ontrack easy recover as provided by said friend me to look at it its got that user friendly user interface that all terrible software like norton have - yet it actually does a really good job at recovery data.

As for seagates, I purchased x4 500gb hdd recently and had thrown them together in a raid 5 setup but was only running short test runs setting up the pc. Went out one night came back and yerh oops should of spaced them out a little better or looked at the cooling first as all 4 were to hot to touch and one sadly didnt make it... 1 fan later they are all together playing nicely.

 

[Liam]

I've got a few Ontrack products on my handy bootdisk.

Arc, did you get a message like Drive read error, CTRL ALT DELETE to restart?

I had this problem with a pc last week, drive unreadable in two pcs, could see it in 'my' pc but it appeared as an unformatted drive with raw data on it, I went into the bios and changed the IDE Slave settings to read the drive and on a reboot I could see it, I just copied the necessary stuff of it and blanked it.

Liam