Hard Drive Failure - Off Road Photos Gone!

[KNOBmeister]

All Interested:

The outcome of my HD failure:

Thanks to advice from Lance, my old friend from our Peak to Peak Miata Club, I took his advice
and did NOT freeze or open the hard drive .......
Since he is a retired 'HD' Engineer for Seagate Corporation ...... he had a friend who worked at MAXTOR in Longmont
and that friend of his was willing to do a personal diagnosis
of my 200GB drive ........ I took it up to him so he could
do a clean room check of the "Guts" .......
Turns out that the disks had self destructed to a fine black powder!
:behead:
OH CRUD!!!! No recover was possible!

At least I wasn't out the multi hundred dollar fee the 'Data Recovery' People wanted just to look at the drive!
The MAXTOR people were great to as the drive was still under
warranty and their RMA department back east replaced
the drive without charge!
:biggrin2:

I learned my lesson and will backup all photos onto a mirror HD and onto DVDs and CD's off site!

Joe
:driving:

 

[yabedude]

Joe:

Sorry to read about your lose. It's always a heart wrenching thing to go through.

For reference, I've had much success using a product called DFSee. http://www.dfsee.com.

My 20GB died in Sept/04 and this product was able to recover darn near everything from it. It's certainly not user friendly, but it works well on many disk formats. It has way too many features to try and list here. I've also used it to recover email messages that a co-worker deleted. Fortunately, Outlook creates a temp file each time a msg is opened.

 

[Bobby]

Sorry to hear about your misfortune.

A couple of things you can do to prevent future data loss is to buy 2 identical drives and a RAID controller. Mirror the drives (RAID 1) so if one fails, the other will keep working until the bad drive is replaced. You should actually buy 3 drives and keep one as a spare if you can afford it.

Back up on DVDs or CDs should be a short term solution. They're not a long term media and the data on DVD/CDs burned by a computer usually don't last long (less than 5 yrs, sometimes only a year).


The most common reason for hard drive failures is heat. Most people don't have enough airflow thru their computers and especially around their hard drives. They tend to run hot, especially if you use disk intensive processes (copying files, videos, graphics, etc). I built my own computer and have 2 80mm fans blowing over 4 HDs in my current setup. It runs 24/7 with Diskeeper and AV running every 2-3 days (very disk intensive) and I also have a PVR (Personal Video Recorder, kinda like Tivo w/o monthly fees). I've had all my computers set up this way for the last 8 yrs or so and I've never had a bad HD.