Good advice, well two bits actually. Too late for me now!

[Project88]

1 - Back up your hard drive
2 - If your hard drive stops working, no matter how tempting they might look, don't undo those screws holding the top on it

No sympathy expected, but wanted to share my sad tell to help prevent the same happening to you.

After 7 years of unreasonably reliable service my hard drive just went bang. PC froze, I turned it off, then when I turned it back on the hard drive was making an awful mechanical clicking (gear teeth clicking over each other type of sound). The screen announced a helpful message, something like, the hard drive is not found, insert system disk. Oh my goodness I thought, well something like that anyway :evil:

So, being an engineer I had no choice but to dive in with the screw driver. Sounds mechanical I thought I can fix that. What pitiful defences against my attack, I thought as I undid the tiny torx screws, two of which hidden under the makers label (Western Digital). As the top came off, I admired myself in the gleaming mirrored faces of the disks inside, ha this shouldn't take long Even took time to show off the success to my dearest.

When inside there was no obvious gearbox to persuade into mesh :? So I thought I would get out the old laptop (wot I am using now) and Google it. Some minutes later the full extent of the error of my ways hit me. Consistent advice was never, never, never open the hard drive box; they are assembled in a clean room for a reason. The drive head skims over the disk with a clearance of about a micron and even cigarette smoke landing on the face of the disk will cause failure. Hmm I thought thats why the disk face looked so nice and shiny :roll: I looked again at the exposed disk face now along side me on the desk top, it looked like it had attracted every loose fibre from every carpet in the house. As I drew breath to blow them off I realised that this was not going to help. If it wasn't dead before it certainly was now

As the time has passed the extent of the situation has sunk home. Dozen's of woodworking pdf files down loaded, now lost.
Hundreds of web address book marked, now lost.
goodness knows how many useful, helpful, important emails; all gone.
All those applications installed and tweaked; have to start all over again.

All of that is annoying, but the worst of it is about 4 years of family photos, not printed off, lost forever.

So, go out and treat yourself to an external hard drive and do a back up. If nothing else it would be some consolation if others could benefit from my errors.

Cheers,
John.

 

[RogerS]

John

Sorry to hear your bad luck. Depending on how deep your pockets go there are companies out there who can extract stuff from these drives..even, so I am told, when the drives have been opened up.

Just a thought.

Roger

 

[StevieB]

Before you bin it John is it not possible to send it to a specialist data recovery company? If they are irreplacable family photos it would be worth a try - if it doesnt work you have lost nothing, if it does what you gain is priceless.

I have never used any but a google search throws up loads eg

http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/

or this no data no fee one:

http://www.easyrestore.co.uk/

HTH,

Steve.

 

[mambo]

sorry to hear this John its happened to me a few times and i never learn thing is now i got so many backups i dont know which one is the latest :roll:

 

[MrJay]

Ouch.

Loosing the photos is indeed a shame. If there's a down side to digital cameras (apart from the technology/progress/your new camera is now redundant - gotta buy a new one whammy) it's the fleeting nature of not having a physical copy of your pictures. Go get them burnt onto CDs/printed people.

Regards backing up: best thing I ever did was start paying for web hosting. All my email can live on the mail server - If my PC dies I've got a backup and I never lifted a finger (apart from ticking the "don't delete mail from the server" option). All my important files get backed up onto my webspace. My house could blow up and I'll still be able to recover all my useful files from the ether and fill in my tax return at the end of the year.

Whether or not I'd be able to remember all my passwords though...

 

[Charley]

I've had a few hard drives die in the past. It won't help you now but putting the failed hard-drive in the freezer or dropping it flat onto a hard surface usually brings it back to life long enough to get the data off it.

There might be a chance you can get some of your photos back (at least your most recent ones). While on holiday my memory card was full so I transferred the photos to the laptop, deleted them from the card then someone tripped over the laptop's power cord and pulled it out and of course there wasn't enough battery power so the laptop turned off corrupting the photos in the process.. But I managed to recover all the photos directly from the memory card using a piece of software called CameraSalvage.. CameraSalvage is for the mac but there're quite a few similar programs for the PC which might be worth a try?..

 

[Blister]

Hi John

Did you have to remove a small sticker that said " do not remove " to get the screws out



sorry , couln not resist

Coat , Door , out of here

 

[duncanh]

If all is lost then be sure to salvage the magnets from inside - they are incredibly strong and are excellent for holding tools when fixed to the wall. One is strong enough to hold my largest turning gouge with ease!

Just make sure that you don't get a finger trapped between the two magnets - they can snap together with enough force to really hurt.

And the drive platters make good drinks coasters

Duncan

 

[promhandicam]

Sorry. I used these people - Vogon when I had a laptop HD crash. They got back 95% but it wasn't cheap. Might be worth a look. Steve

 

[Fecn]

As a last-ditch emergency attempt try the following... (I've had this work three times out of about 20 in the past).

Hard disk motors usually have three or four windings inside them. When one of the windings fails, the motor no longer has the power to get itself started up....

Remove the drive from the PC case, but leave the cables attached... When you power on the PC, try giving the drive a rapid twist which will result in the platters inside the drive twisting too. Sometimes that's enough to get the platters spinning again and you can recover the data... (Most times you've got no chance)

Although the manufacturers warnings about dust on the platter are valid, it's not actually as totally catastrophic as they make out. With the lid back on and the platters spinning, any surface dust tends to be spun off the disks to the outsides. Avoid fingerprints/grease etc though... and if you do get any dust on the platters don't be tempted to blow/wipe it off, you'll only make it worse.

HD Recovery services will take the platters from your disk in a clean-room environment and put them into another drive with working motor and electronics - They are decidedly not cheap though.

What exact model of drive was it - If it was 7 years old, I might actually have a spare working one here whcih you could pilfer the electronics from.

Fecn

 

[Project88]

Thank you all very much for your replies, advice and offers, but things are not quite as bad as I feared

The hard drive has definitely gone bang. The failure is not that the disk won't spin, but that the read head is stuck in the centre of the disk. I have decided not to go the data recovery route as it appears to very expensive. As FECN mentions my type of failure will require a clean room removal of the disks and re assembly into a new drive. Can be done, but at a cost and still no guarantee of success.

The really good news is that about a year a go, I must have copied the Documents and Settings folder from the main PC to the laptop. Don't why I did it and I can't even remember doing it, but I must have because it is there

The folder contains "My Pictures" with most of the old family snaps, the Outlook .pst folder with the old 'important' emails and the favorites albeit a little out of date. whoopee!! not a total write off after all, and it appears that I have also won some powerful magnets :wink:

All in all a painful enough lesson for me to learn by (well maybe? :lol: )

Thanks again.

Cheers
John.

 

[Nick W]

In light of this can anyone recommend an on-line backup service? There seem to be a few around, but how to know which one to go for ...

 

[promhandicam]

I've gone down the external USB hard drive route as I have a couple of compters and can move it from one to the other. for things like photos I also back up to CD-R and store in the UK as we've had friends working in this part of the world who have had to leave in a hurry and ended up loosing everything. My biggest problem is doing the backups regularly - I must set up some kind of automated system.

A final tip - learnt the hard way - is that outlook doesn't store data in the My Documents folder, which is the one most people who do backup, back up. However you can download an add in from microsoft which lets you automatically schedule a backup of outlook - emails and addresses to a folder of your choice. I've created an Outlook Backup folder in My documents and so everything (more or less) is in one place.

Steve

 

[brianhabby]

I have had a few experiences with losing data, nothing as catastrophic as loads of family photos though. What I have done now though is install a N.A.S. (Network Access Drive) which makes the data available from both my desktop computer and my notebook via the broadband network router.

The model I bought is made by Netgear and I have fitted it with two drives (You buy the housing and make your own choice as to which hard drives you put in it). The beauty of it is that although I have got two 300GB drives I only have 300GB available because the drives are mirrored. In other words when I save a file it is saved to both drives simultaneously thereby creating a backup as you go.

Not completely foolproof (what is) but as good as I can ever hope to have and the chances of both drives failing at the same time must be very small indeed.

As far as photos are concerned, we used to have negatives and we always had prints made from them. If we ever mislaid the negatives we could always get a copy made from the print so all was not lost. Well might I suggest that you go and get prints made from your digital pictures. This will be the best backup and they are so much easier to view as prints rather than images on a computer screen, easier to share with friends and family also.

One argument against this method of course is that because we take more digital photos than we ever did with film cameras (no film cost), the cost of printing them all out could get expensive, but I would suggest that if this is the case then simply choose the most treasured ones and at least make prints from those. Most photo labs will charge in the region of 10p or less for 6" x 4" pictures so it shouldn't be too expensive anyway.

Hope this is of some help

regards

Brian

 

[CarlC]

All of that is annoying, but the worst of it is about 4 years of family photos, not printed off, lost forever.

I feel for ya.If that was me i would have took the sledge hammer out of the shed and beated the hell out of the hard drive.(and then starting to cry :lol
Proper tight.

 

[Colin C]

In light of this can anyone recommend an on-line backup service? There seem to be a few around, but how to know which one to go for ...

Hi Nick

I use this software and it gets very good reviews, you can use disc or a hardrive to back up on.

A friend uses it and he know alot more than me about computers ( which is not hard :roll: