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[urlwolf]

I had 166Gb of music, and a backup, both on exteral HDs. Believe it or not, You heard it right my main an backup drives died at the same time (!).

I'm sure people here have had some experiences with data recovery programs. I'm posting this in the hope that somebody has a good recommendation (free programs preferred). I have tried testdisk and spinrite.

The main HD I have is an external (USB) seagate barracuda 250Gb that makes a clicking sound. Spinrite hungs when run on this drive.

TestDisk sees the drive (mounts it under winXP, whereas the OS would not do that), and it could retrieve the data, but the clicking sound makes me think that this is a hardware problem and it may not be advisable to let the disk run.

I have the same data on another HD (300gb).
 
This one can be seen by the os, but the directory in which I had ~170Gb of music is now broken and I can only see ~ 6 albums. THere was a huge three in the mp3 folder (probably not a good practice). When running chkdsk, I get pages and pages of "File record segment X is unreadable".
 
It is still reading so I don't know if chkdsk will be able to recover it. In a first pass yesterday, it said that it didn't have enough disk space to fix the problems. So I cleared some stuff and tried again today. Althoughm now that I think of it, it must be in the recycler so maybe the space is not there for chkdsk to work.
 
Spinrite stalls forever on that disk trying to fix the error with dynadata (!). Time estimation: 300h, not a good solution, as it reads bit by bit even then. Half a day went by with only .0833% advance.

Any recommendations?
Thanks a lot in advance

[Robert Taylor]

You could try a data recovery company. I have had success with this, but it costs mucho $$$s.

Here in Aus, it cost me around $3500 some 6 years ago to get a drive recovered, but I DID get the data back which I needed.

Otherwise I'd say, time to start re-ripping...

One point I would make, although it's probably not such an issue in the US, but here, I'm now careful to NOT buy more than one hard drive from the same place / manufacturer at a time.

The reason is that I was once stung by buying 4 X Seagate drives. Two in one hit, and the other two in another.

At one point (after I had bought the second 80Gb pair thank goodness), BOTH of the first pair of drives failed within one day of each other, leading me to believe that it might have been a "bad batch" or something. Later on one of the second pair also failed. I now no longer buy Seagate, but prefer Western Digital or Maxtor...

I've been paranoid ever since...

[Mr ChriZ]

Check disk is suprisingly good now a days.  I wouldn't be suprised if it put things
right, esp if the drive is NTFS formatted.

I've thought a couple of times I'd lost everything (Mainly after using Paritition Magic, or using tools not designed for 48bit Block Addressing) and Check disk has put things right. 
Putting things in the recycling bin may not have helped as it may have caused disk activity
as I think the recycling bin is still a compressed folder.

[GHammer]

Active@ UNDELETE and R-Studio are the best at this in my experience.

[hit_ny]

I've thought a couple of times I'd lost everything (Mainly after using Paritition Magic, or using tools not designed for 48bit Block Addressing) and Check disk has put things right. 

Hmm, not noticed this yet, even tho i use 250GB HDs but the partitions on them are 120GB to mirror to older drives easily for backup. The latest version i think is 8.05.

Then Symantec bought them, not sure what version they are at now.

[Mr ChriZ]

Hmm, not noticed this yet, even tho i use 250GB HDs but the partitions on them are 120GB to mirror to older drives easily for backup. The latest version i think is 8.05.

Then Symantec bought them, not sure what version they are at now.

I haven't used it for a while (Kinda put me off!)  Version I've got is 8.0, guess they've
fixed it in the new one.
There was defintiley a few ugly moments tho!

[urlwolf]

Ok, I got R-studio working on the drive now. It is creating an image, although most of the drive is unreadable. Doesn't look like it's going to recover much.

I don't think I'll pay big $$$ for the pro data recovery company, if push comes to shove I can rerip in a lossless format...

[GHammer]

As long as you have the CDs and shiny new drives, look at it as an excuse to evaluate lossless formats, rethink your naming scheme, and sit back while you re-rip.

Your luck sounds much like mine. I was rearranging drives. I knew I had current backups. I hit the delete key. 15 seconds later, the auto backup kicked in. Did it's job perfectly, everything was erased on the backup drives just like it should...

R-Studio works great when it is simple like that, but I have also used it to recover from bad drives.

Good luck!

[Mr ChriZ]

As long as yu have the CDs and shiny new drives, look at it as an excuse to evaluate lossless formats, rethink your naming scheme, and sit back while you re-rip.

Your luck sounds much like mine. I was rearranging drives. I knew I had current backups. I hit the delete key. 15 seconds later, the auto backup kicked in. Did it's job perfectly, everything was erased on the backup drives just like it should...

R-Studio works great when it is simple like that, but I have also used it to recover from bad drives.

Good luck!

Worst thing I ever done like that was to buy a brandnew hard drive.
Maxtor 10gb (When 10gb was an unusable amount of space).
I unscrewed the bay on the case which also held the floppy drive, and the old drive.
Screwed the new drive into the bay, then put
 the bay back.  Now because I wanted to clone the existing drive on to
the new one and then remove the old drive, i thought "hell no need to screw
the bay back in, i'll just slot it back in place"....
Famous last words...
Got the computer booted up...
started copying across.
Then forgot what i'd done  and put a floppy disk in the floppy drive, however the last push
to engage didn't push the disk into the drive, it pushed the bay off of the rails.
The bay was at the top of a full size tower case, crashed down to the bottom.
both drives never read another byte of data.
I'm not usually a swearing person...
but I made up for it that day!

[hit_ny]

I had 166Gb of music, and a backup, both on exteral HDs. Believe it or not, You heard it right my main an backup drives died at the same time (!).

..still trying to figure out how the backup dies as well !!!!

..or was it set to sync up like Hammer's.

I knew I had current backups. I hit the delete key. 15 seconds later, the auto backup kicked in. Did it's job perfectly, everything was erased on the backup drives just like it should...

Yet another reason not to trust automatic backups.

[hit_ny]

One point I would make, although it's probably not such an issue in the US, but here, I'm now careful to NOT buy more than one hard drive from the same place / manufacturer at a time.

I'm with you re: the time but manufacturer can be tricky depending on the PC  (particularly on older PCs & large HD's) you want to install the drives in. Theory says that you can mix & match any drives you want. I found in practice  if they are all from the same manufacturer they tend to be detected by the BIOs and play together much better than not.

I now no longer buy Seagate, but prefer Western Digital or Maxtor...

Maxtor had a good rep till a few yrs back when i noticed lots of ppl complaining about them. Maxtor's in recent yrs tend to be less heat tolerant. The ones i use are 5yr old 120Gb ones, mainly for backup and removed once done, still working like champs.

I'm currently on all Seagates and don't have any probs to date (knock on wood). When i tried to mix wester digitals in, things got a bit hairy. leading me to go all Seagates.

[Jaguu]

I have 4 (!) different external backup devices:

1) Freecom 120GB device with integrated HD
2) 2 external USB2 cases with exchangable 120GB HDD (holding older HDD)
3) 1 LaCie 2 1/2" 80GB HDD.

I rotate between them on a regular basis with two backup cycles: one for docs + images (more frequent) and one for audio + video (less frequent), I also backup docs + images on DVD from time to time.

[GHammer]

One every three months, I write new music to DVD.
Every month, AFTER a checksum compare, I do a backup to a hard drive.

If I add lots of music, I do a monthly then. But as a rule, that's my method not to get caught empty-handed again. I love DVD writers, a pain to get the initial writing done, but to add new stuff is painless.

[LonWar]

I'm with you re: the time but manufacturer can be tricky depending on the PC  (particularly on older PCs & large HD's) you want to install the drives in. Theory says that you can mix & match any drives you want. I found in practice  if they are all from the same manufacturer they tend to be detected by the BIOs and play together much better than not.
Maxtor had a good rep till a few yrs back when i noticed lots of ppl complaining about them. Maxtor's in recent yrs tend to be less heat tolerant. The ones i use are 5yr old 120Gb ones, mainly for backup and removed once done, still working like champs.

I'm currently on all Seagates and don't have any probs to date (knock on wood). When i tried to mix wester digitals in, things got a bit hairy. leading me to go all Seagates.

I only buy Maxtor.... I have NEVER had problems.....

I have:

2 * 300 gb 16 mb cache
2 * 160 gb 8 mb cache
1 * 300 gb 8 mb cache external
1 * 250 gb 8 mb cache external

The 300's are new, but the 160's are a few years old....

[urlwolf]

Nice, thanks for the answers.
What I did was (1) sotp chkdsk as soon as I learned it does no good (several hours working already  ) and (2) run rtt R-Studio, doing an image of the 300gb disk. It's working fine for now, almost 70gb recovered and it still has 2/3 to go.

The drives were independent. One was "a backup" in the sense that it contained a copy of the other, but no actual backup prog. was used (just the same tree).

The clicking HD was a seagate with 5 years warranty so I just got an RMA and sent it back. The 300gv I'll try to low-level format and use it again. I'll have 3 external HDs, 2 x 250 + 1 x 300. I may go RAID 1 or something similar if that's possible under win.

This reminds me that there is no safety in just having one backup. Also, I'm sure the tree was too big and that taxed the HD. Do you know of any 'good practices' list to keep a HD happy?

Thanks

[tcman41]

I only trust seagate drives, i have had other drives and to fix them i revert to diskeeper first, it's amazing what that program can do.

In addition to scheduled defragging, you can also run boot time frags which are awesome and even adjust the drives MTF which keeps it healthy. When these things are done on a regular basis the drive will run much faster.

TC 

[Mr ChriZ]

I love it how everyone has different theorys as to
who makes the most reliable hard drive.
I really believe it's down to luck of the batch it came from.

I still love the Hitachi Deathstars because they make the
least amount of noise that I've come across.  My coursemates
tell me I must be mad to trust em, however the first one I bought
is still going strong coming up for five years old
I've had problems with Maxtor.  I've a mate who's seagate died
after a month.
At work I've also seen Fujitsu's and Samsungs go down.
I've not heard of any problems with WD but I'm sure if you look it
up you'll find people that have.

I reckon when you've got a disk spinning at 7200RPM placing data in
the most miniscule of holes, and hundreds of these disks being manufactured every hour
the best manufacturers in the world are gonna produce some that don't work now and then!

[GHammer]

When I used to buy 1000s of drives, we refused Western Digital.
IBM (now Hitachi) OEM drives were the best value.
Seagate drives gave us no trouble. Since we dealt with local and LD carriers, reliability was paramount.

I have a 4 year old Seagate in an uncooled USB enclosure. It has bounced from town to town in China and back and forth to the US. Never a glitch.

I recently replaced a friends Maxtor. It was 6 months old.

My systems have all Seagate now, because I am not able to find IBM/Hitachi OEMs for sale here at a good price.

[urlwolf]

quick update:
all music recovered. thanks to R-studio!

[GHammer]

quick update:
all music recovered. thanks to R-studio!

Glad to hear it.
That's one of those tools you hope you don't need, but want to work well when you do.

[JimH]

quick update:
all music recovered. thanks to R-studio!

Wow!

[hit_ny]

I'm sure the tree was too big and that taxed the HD. Do you know of any 'good practices' list to keep a HD happy?

Assuming you were using NTFS, i can't understand why this would affect the HD or its backup for that matter.

[gk666999]

quick update:
all music recovered. thanks to R-studio!

I recovered all lost data on 3 different occasions with R-Studio - great tool!

[park]

My movies drive failed on me this weekend. When i plug it into the laptop (external usb drive) i get the ping pong that windows throws up to tell me something is recognised, but then nothing in the tree at all. When i disconnect it, windows dutifully ping pongs to tell me i've disconnected it. I took the drive out of the case and swapped it with a drive in another case to see if the case was the problem, but the same thing happened. Am I right to assume that the actual hard disk has had it? I guess that there's no way to recover something that doesnt even show up as a device, right?

[stuart_tetley]

Seems we all have very different experiences on drive reliability.

For me, I had 4 Quantum U160 SCSI drives for a machine with a Newtek Video Toaster in it.  The drives were set up as a 4-drive Raid 0 array (the Toaster loves sustained throughput...)

2 failed in the first month, and a 3rd in the second month.

All were easily replaced in the 5 year warranty, and 2 of the replacements were Maxtor U320 devices (Maxtor had bought Quantum by this point.)

One of the two U320s failed after maybe 6 months. Again replaced under warranty.

As to regular IDE drives, I've used almost every brand out there, and haven't lost one yet.  I did have a laptop drive's partition table hosed by Scandisk (not sure which Windows version.)   I used a program called BPR (Boot/Partition Repair) from a data restoration company called Atlanta Data Services to rescue that one.

Aside from my SCSI experience, almost all the problems I've had were caused by software (registry becoming corrupted, or critical Windows files going bye-bye.)

This R-Studio sounds like something I should check out.

[Two Wire]

Two techniques which have been used by others to retrieve data loss due to hard drive failure are freezing the hard drive, and replacing the paltters.

Using the freezing technique requires placing the hard drive in a freezer for about 24 hours. When sure the drive is frozen, quickly connect it (you will have about 20 minutes before it approaches room temperature) and move the data to a predetermined location.

Replacing the platters requires taking the faultly hard drive apart and carefully removing the platters. Replace the platters in a known good hard drive of the same mfg. and part no. If the data can be retrieved, transfer it to another hard drive, and junk the other two.

This technique assumes the fault is in the hard drive electronics, and not in the platters. Use precautions to keep dust and dandruf off of the platters. Wear latex gloves and handle the platters by the outer edges.

The techniques may not work in all cases, but if you don't want to pay the costs to have this done professionaly, or other techniques do not work, then you might want to find out more about these options. They work!

[JimH]

Two techniques which have been used by others to retrieve data loss due to hard drive failure are freezing the hard drive, and replacing the paltters.

Using the freezing technique requires placing the hard drive in a freezer for about 24 hours. When sure the drive is frozen, quickly connect it (you will have about 20 minutes before it approaches room temperature) and move the data to a predetermined location.

I did that once and it worked perfectly (only froze for about 30 minutes).  I had not seen it recommended anywhere, but guessed it might work when I found that I could get a little data off if I turned the PC off, let it sit for a while, then turned it on again.

[KingSparta]

Use precautions to keep dust and dandruf off of the platters. Wear latex gloves and handle the platters by the outer edges

this really must be done in a clean room, I mean Really Clean

no dust, use a mask

I hope no one tries this just to get another year out of there drive.

PS: i also heard dry ice works too

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[JimH]

this really must be done in a clean room, I mean Really Clean

Bob has done this successfully a couple times here, and I don't think anyone has ever said "Hey this place is Really Clean!".

[Mr ChriZ]

Bob has done this successfully a couple times here, and I don't think anyone has ever said "Hey this place is Really Clean!".

ROFL..

I've never even heard of this technique before! 
When my Dissertation's due in next day and I've had multiple drive failure,
I'll remember to set my freezer to north pole mode just in case =)

[KingSparta]

I was reading about this one day and they showed a picture of the platter and the read\write heads that hover over the platter.

Then they took and blew smoke over the platter, and then they showed an image of the platter again, the smoke residue was higher than the clearance of the head and platter.

They also showed images of the platter after 1-24 hours and showed how the dust collected on the platters.

So they said that due to this make sure you have the environment as dust free and clean as possible

It has been like 10 years now but I don’t think drives have changed all that much.

I have read something a few months ago that Maxtor has found a way to arrange data on the drive in another format that will increase the amount of data they can fit on a platter by 33% or so.

[skeeterfood]

I work on HDD Controllers (the chip on the Hard Drive) for a living and I'm still surpised every day how many drives actually work.

I had a competitors drive crash on me the other day and after a little FA (Failure Analysis), also known as ripping the drive apart, it was pretty obvious it was a goner.  Scratches on the platter are NEVER a good sign.  Oh, and the top head dangling from the armature wasn't a good sign either.  My guess is the head smacked a large piece of dust then took a header into the platter.  When the drive tried to seek to the next track it literally ripped the head off the armature and then continued gouging out its course across the drive...

The data on the other 3 sides was probably still readable, but not worth the effort...

I'd be willing to try the platter swap if I REALLY cared about the data, had an exact duplicate built at roughly the same time I was willing to crucify, and had exhausted all other methods.  But, I definitely wouldn't expect the drive to last long after throwing that much dust into it...

I have no idea what the freezer method is supposed to help.  I guess if the head is stuck to the platter it could maybe help break it loose?

-John

[JimH]

I have no idea what the freezer method is supposed to help.  I guess if the head is stuck to the platter it could maybe help break it loose?

Good story.  I wondered the same about the freezing (which I saw and it worked).  Is it possible that a chip that is going bad is affected?  Or a physical crack in a circuit?  With my case, before I tried the freezer, I observed that when the drive cooled, I could get a file or two off and then it would stop working completely.

[KingSparta]

I thought this was the answer but went looking for someone who had the reason to conferm it. This is what the "Expert" Had to Say.

Freezing the hard drive for an hour or so will make the metal contract enough so that the heads are lifted back off the platters and your data can be read from it. Of course, once it thaws back out, the heads will crash back on to the platters and kill it some more, so this is only a last chance soution to get important data off the drive.

[JimH]

Well, maybe that's it.  My experience was dramatic.  It was like the difference between being stuck in the snow, rocking back and forth, and getting out and driving away. 

I took the bad drive apart and kept the bare mechanism on my fireplace mantle like a trophy for a few years.

[LonWar]

The comments on this web site were created as a public service.

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Well that pretty much covers everything

[hit_ny]

quick update:
all music recovered. thanks to R-studio!

This is one of the hidden advantages of working with windows. Your drive wasn't really dead, it just reached some magic number of dead sectors and windows refused to read it.

Now had that been on one of those free OS's, they hardly crash, but when HDs go , they remain gone.

[JimH]

We've used a lot of Windows, Linux, and Unix over the last 25 years.  I don't notice any difference in which OS has the most drive failures.

[hit_ny]

OS does not make a difference re drive failures, but try harder to read. And since they usually do that, they use up every last bit of what the HD can offer. If it goes down, it's usually HW failure at this point.

For some reason, the idea of using knoppix did not strike. This is the first thing to try if windows refuses to read a HD.

[GHammer]

You can also check on the health of your drives from time to time.
I use SpeedFan for other reasons, but it has the ability to do an online analysis of S.M.A.R.T. data. Pretty nice service. And free.

Here's an example of the report. I think, may be tied to data on my system.
http://www.hddstatus.com/hdrepshowreport.php?ReportCode=101246&ReportVerification=827FA6FE

[Alex B]

My newest HD had a problem this morning when I tried to boot my HTPC.

Windows couldn't start anymore. At a certain point the process halted and I could hear a knocking noise coming from the HD.

I bought this Maxtor MaXline III 300 GB SATA drive two months ago. It came with a 5-year warranty. (This series has a longer warranty period than the DiamondMax series.)

I have backups (from last week), but most likely fixing the problem will take many, many hours and if the drive is broken I need to buy a spare drive first. I am not going to touch my backup drives before the system is up and tested to be fine.

[Mr ChriZ]

I'm staying away from this post from now on,
it's cursed