Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[nila]

A friend came over today who I hadn't seen in a while and he's started working for a computer store building machines and the company he works for has been building a lot of demo bench mark machines for magazines and so tweeking them to the max. My CPU fan (Volcano 7) is noisy as hell so I opened the side of the case while it was running to let him hear how loud it was.
Suddenly I got a blue screen of death saying that there was a problem with some of my hardware and that if it was the first time I had recieved this message I should restart my computer.
I did so only to find it was lagging at the initial detection of my IDE devices. Eventually when it did detect them it couldn't find my Primary Hard drive. Much playing later and I realised that no matter what I was doing it wouldn't detect it.
I put it on a friends machine and that cant detect it either.
Basically the drive is dead.
The drive had my OS and all my programs on (not too big a loss), my outlook e-mail file with all my e-mails in (reasonably annoying loss) and also EVERY SINGLE WEB SITE I'VE made to date and a couple of them I dont have ANY backup's for, including one I'd JUST finished yesterday. My own personal site was on there too and there's NO backup of that and it'd been build up over years and taken me ages to make it.
Grrrrr!!!!!!!!!!!!
All my work down the drain.
All my original Photoshop files for all my sites were on there too and are now lost.!
I cant afford 2k or whatever to have a specialist recover it for me so basically I am royally screwed.

Compare that to your day and you've had a gorgeous day no matter what happened to you, even if you got hit by a car!

[TURBO]

Check the stock market.

[JimH]

Turbo,
Amen.

Nila,
I'll tell you a story.  Maybe it will help.  Maybe it won't.

Three or four years ago, my wife's computer, on which she also had EVERYTHING, wouldn't read.  If you shut it off for an hour, it would boot and, with difficulty, get to the desktop.

She took it to the local computer clinic.  They pronounced it dead.

A few days went by.  I decided to boot it again.  It came up, but then froze.  I began to try to get files off it and onto another PC connected by ethernet.  I found I could get a few files each time it came to life, but in a minute or two it was hopeless.  Heat, I thought.  It's OK when it's cool.  After testing this theory a while, I removed the drive and put it in the freezer.  An hour later, I hooked it up, and everything came off.  All was saved.  

The drive was on our mantle, bare naked, for another couple of years.

[JasonJoel]

No sympathy here.. You SHOULD have had a backup - there ARE no excuses, ever, period.

In any case though, the motherboard won't even detect the drive? Or it will detect the drive, but not boot into the OS, or see the drive as a valid drive?

If the latter, you may have hope. I used a program called Tiramisu (yes I know that is also a food) and it worked AWESOME. But it was sold to one company or another and is now sold for a lot more money. You can still find demo/older versions of it on the web though (as long as you don't have NTFS I guess... not sure it did that).

Anyway, been there done that (although I backup 3 times a week, losing two days worth of work is a REAL bummer - I feel your pain).

Jason Bottjen

[Chico]

>>No sympathy here.. You SHOULD have had a backup - there ARE no excuses, ever, period.

No offense, but that was really cold JasonJoel!  I have sympathy for anyone who lost a drive with all their work on it (backed up or not).  After working all day on a project untill you can't keep your eyes open anymore, then to have it just get ripped out right before your eyes is a horrifying ordeal.  Woulda-shoulda-coulda's don't help any.  Even if it was backed up, it takes a long time to recover from from a main HD blowout.

My sympathy goes to you Nila.  I really hope that you can recover from this.

[NY40Male]

Hope You Had Your Registration File Backup Also..
Had To See You Gripe To JRiver Like Everyone Else
LOL

[jfmus]

Nila,

Check out this website. The company is owned by a good friend of mine. He deals with big business primarily, but still has a heart for the little guy. If the stuff was that important it might be worth the while. I can't tell you what he will charge, but if nothing is recovered I don't think it will cost you anything. I am sure he would be reasonable based on your situation.

RenewData

Ian

[Maxx]

I’ve read your story and imagined how I would have feel if it happened to me……………. Really really really bad!!!

And now I have this urge to backup my stuff. So I’m now leaving the Windows world for the night and head to DOS land for a full Ghost of my hard drive...



Sorry for your lost.

[phatrabt]

I'm sorry to hear that Nila, hopefully it won't cost TOO much to recover the data.  Good luck and I hope that you get everything back!

phatrabt

[john]

As a mildly competent windows user with no competence with DOS, what do you guys recommend as an easy way to backup a hard drive?  I never had the need to do so until I started my mp 3 collection...

Any thoughts, much appreciated.

John

[NY40Male]

Norton Ghost - makes an image of the whole hard drive
ViceVersa by http://www.tgrmn.com/ - fairly easy backup program

[aRCLiGHT]

Makes me feel better that I just transfered all my MP3's over to one of my companies older fibre channel RAID array.  10x18GB drives plus striped with Win2k.  Wahoo!!

Nothing beats a good backup!!!

aRCLiGHT

[BigMike]

Sorry to here about the bad news. Word of advice - if you haven't got it - get Norton Ghost and use it to back up your hard drive to another drive. Ghost is the one program I can not live without. It has never failed me, and has saved my butt many times. It's fast, it's darn near foolproof, and it doesn't care how big your backup is, as long as the other drive has room for the backup image file, which can be compressed. Of course it's still up to us to make sure we backup our hardrive on a regular basis, but Ghost makes it effortless.

[Lucy]

I have an also big problem 6 days ago.
I remember I was having fun at "Lucy what do you see". But last saturday when I turned on my computer in the morning, it just produced "bibi" sound and the black screen said "CPU fan does not function properly". I opened the case and saw that the CPU fans were(and are) still functioning. It was moving. Seconds later, the computer was turned off by **ITSELF**!

I pressed the power button many times and the computer gave me the same thing. I was shocked and sad because of my 400 songs there like "sinking deep into the sea" ...

I did not turn it on the whole afternoon because I had a German class at an university.

In the evening I pressed the power button agin, and surprisingly it did not show "CPU fan does not......" again. I could enter windows XP again. I immediately burnt my 400 songs onto CDs.

But bad luck kept following me. My computer did not start (no boot just told me cpu fan problem and shut down itself) on Sunday again. My brother tried to press the power button by *N* times and at one time he surprisingly got it to boot again. He immediate pressed Delete to go to disable cpu temperature detection. He thought that would prevent my pc to recognise wrongly about somethings.

My computer can start again. I tried to restart and restart. I could start it everytime again. My borther believed the motherboard is having problems. Anyway, I have been very lucky that my pc was not down before the deadline of any take-home examination/term paper!

I will purchase a new motherboard soon!

Nila I hope you can find some ways to make your drive work again.

[phelt]

I had a system drive choke once. The BIOS didn't even see the drive. I used ontrack easy recovery pro and got back most of the data. It's expensive, like 500 dollars, but less expensive than sending your drive to someone, I guess.

[PhatPhreddy]

Sorry to hear about your drive and I do have sympathy but as you now know once you have been bitten backups become a part of your computing lifestyle... Compare your day to my Tuesday / Weds..

All of my possessions that meant anything to me in the world (evrything I own to all intents and purposes) including a very advanced home theater including 2 projectors a good 10k's worth of audio gear.. My lifetime CD collection... near 500 DVD's some art I have collected... 4 computers and some assorted computer hardware (networking / UPS's etc) etc etc was shipped air frieght to Thailand... This was cleared and checked and duty free as it was all pre owned stuff and shipped by a returning resident...

It was crated and packed together for security... Apon arrival the fact that its value was excessive started to attract interest... It was then basically ripped apart spread throughout a non secure compound and a similing official informed me that it did not matter what the law was on the subject it could take many months to get it to clear tax free and that a 'fee' must be paid now... Failure to do so would leave it to the mercy of anyone wanting to take a quick grab at it... Ohh and BTW if the fee was not negotiated that day I was being charged storage...

So whats the sum total of your accumulated lifes possessions worth to you ?? In one piece obviously... Of course I had to get the 'big boss' on his lunchbreak (this way he does not have to split it with the rest of the staff) and negotiate... Could have been worse... Welcome to Asia !!! A touch stressful though I can tell you... At one point they threatened to disassemble my speakers to check 'inside' !!!!

[KingSparta]

Nila

There are companies that do disk\data recovery.

if the disk is an IDE drive there is a 3 year waranty, and the company who makes it will replace it for free (maybe shiping). SCSI drives are 5 years (they also cost more).

if a Drive is older than 3 years and it normaly runs all the time, it is always best to replace it before 3 years.

[nila]

I'll try the data recovery program.

I just wish my BIOS would read it because then I know that I could get it back with a recovery program.

I might try the freezer trick too.

I just went out and bought two 80gig IBM 160GXP hard drives, shoved them in my computer with a RAID 1 array so from now on a dead hard drive aint a problem. I dont need to worry about back up's (except for me deleting them or a virus).
Harddrive failure is gonna be a thing of the past. PHEW!

[KingSparta]

>> Harddrive failure is gonna be a thing of the past. PHEW!
What about when your controller Goes bad and corrupts both drives?

[Randy]

you've probably already thought of this but,

as for your web pages, if you're not hosting the sites yourself, you should be able to get all of those files down from the web server???

there are quite a few companies that can recover data off of a crashed hard drive.  ask around at the local computer shops.

good luck, randy.

[zevele1]

Hope you will find a way to get back your data Nila
Concerning freezer ,did you remember the fave in England few years ago:to put cds to freze to get better sound?

King
If you have drives where you put only music on it.And not only it,if you put music on it after tags,sleeves and other things.Means that when you move songs to this drives,you do not change anything,you just play it
In this case can you expect a drive to last long?

[KingSparta]

zevele

no matter what if the drive is on it is turning at 5000|PLS| rpms music or no music.