One of the worst situation ever...

If you lose all your data/songs/stuff,are you willing to pay in order to get it back?

  • I can't lose all this! I'll pay the price!

    Votes: 1 14.3%

  • I got my lesson I guess, so... no.

    Votes: 3 42.9%

  • It depends on the cost of all this...

    Votes: 3 42.9%
  • Total voters
    7
O

oceanflame

New member
By the way, if I'm in the wrong section, sorry...

Ok... So I was working on a song and it was time to go eat something somewhere. I saved my session and shut down the computer correctly as usual. I go to a nice brewery close to my house, have a beer or two:drunk:, eat pizza, etc... I come back to my studio and put my computer on, and guess what? It won't turn on anymore!:confused:

I'm making a short story here: R.I.P. my "wonderful" hard drive! It was like 1 year and 3 months old. Whatever... I lost all my songs! I, of course, do backups, but I finished 6 songs and only have 2 and a half on my portable hard drive. So I'm pissed off, yes. And if I want my data back, it'll cost me like 500$ and more... And since I don't make money out of my songs, it's not that funny to spend all this money on this.

So the question is: If you lose all your data/songs/stuff, are you willing to pay in order to get these back?

I'm sure I'm not the first one who had a situation like this...
 
Ive lost two hard drives in a year...

Do I record others for money..no


Can I record everything again...yes


bought another external and a 1TB...back to work :)
 
Are you sure its the drive that's failed and not some other component in the computer? Assuming it is the drive, there are a few things you can try to get your data back before you ship it off to some cleanroom somewhere and cough up a BUNCH of cash...

First thing... (From a working computer), go download a copy of Linux Mint or some other Linux distro with a "live" cd. Burn a cd, put it in your dead computer and boot er up. This will load Linux into ram so you'll have a working operating system, without affecting any data on your hard drive (which means it will load even if there is NO hard drive present). Once you have a working operating system, open the file manager and look for your files. Assuming you can see your files, you can try to copy them over to an external drive or usb thumb drive or something. I did this on a laptop with a dead drive just last week. It CAN work.

Also, you can try pulling the drive out and putting it into an external usb enclosure that you can plug into another computer. Again, if the drive is toast, you're still screwed.

Failing the first two options, I've also heard that putting a dead drive in the freezer (?!) can help to resurrect a drive long enough to pull some data from it. I've only tried that once, and no surprise, it didn't help, lol. I wont even try to explain or assume why this might work. This would be an act of desperation. :)

If the three of those don't work, I'd say you're f*cked. Either send the drive out and dip into your savings, or more likely, get a new drive, restore what you can from backups and redo whatever it is you've lost.



PART 2- Moving forward. My recording computer has 3 internal hard drives. Drive 1 is for the operating system and program files. Drive 2 is all of my project files and user data, etc. Drive 3 is a mirror backup that runs nightly of drive 2. Every once in a while I'll back all that up to an external drive and put it on my shelf at my office. There are lots of free backup utilities (EXBackItUp and SyncBack come to mind for WinXP, FBack from Win7 works good too) that you can install. Set it to run automatically in the middle of the night while you're sleeping, or make a desktop shortcut that you can run manually at the end of each session, and IMO, you're covered for MOST common disasters- that is a random drive failure. This obviously wont cover you if you get a lightning surge or your house burns down- that's what the external is for. You could also set up the 2 data drives in a mirrored RAID configuration and your data is written to both disks as you go. Of course, that may require some additional hardware (although some better aftermarket motherboards have onboard RAID controllers). Aside from not needing a RAID controller, I like my backup method because I'm also covered if I accidentally overwrite or delete a file that I wanted to keep- I have until my backup runs that night to restore that file.


Anyways... hope that helps...
 
If the computer does not turn on, nothing at all, there is a good chance that it is not the drive.

When you press the button what happens?

1) Nothing - dead power supply or mother board, start wire has fallen off mother board, broken wire between the button and mother board.

2) Power supply springs into life, no screen = dead screen? Dead video card? Dead mother board?

3) Screen springs into life, can't get from dos to start up screen, software problem or dead hard drive.

What have you got going on?

Alan
 
Often times when Windows "dies" and gives you the impression the hard drive went south, nothing is actually wrong with it mechanically. Often times you can put that drive into an external USB enclosure and plug it into a friend's computer and retrieve your data on his computer.

Many linux distributions have a rescue disk that can read (not write) to NTFS partitions, allowing you to boot your dead PC on that, then shuffle off your data on the network to something else, or to DVD's, or whatever.

Every big company in the world uses some kind of technology to protect their data, and you can learn from thier experience - their solution is always RAID and TAPE BACKUPS.

While you personally may not have a need for, or the dollars for, a 256 drive raid array or a $25,000 tape backup system, you can scale things down quite cheaply.

On ebay, there are many, many USB and firewire raid boxes that you can install two identical drives into, and they'll be mirrored automatically by that box. You plug it into your computer, any OS, and it appears as a single drive.

Many higher end computers can be purchased with a raid card - IDE, SATA, SCSI, and also with multiple drives. This gives you the same thing, internally or externally.

A great solution, which I recommend to everyone, is to buy a used NAS device off ebay or from a store, a unit that has multiple hard drives acting as a raid array. They come in all sizes from tiny and cheap (relatively of course) to rackmount, massive and expensive.

To use such a thing, you simply mount that unit as a windows share, and save your data there.

Some units, such as the Buffalo Terastation series of NAS devices, have USB jacks to which you can plug an external USB drive of your choosing, and the system automatically backs itself up to that drive daily, weekly, monthly or whatever you want.

The key to protecting data is to have a copy. Raid makes copies of that data across multiple drives so in real time, if a drive goes bad you still have your data. Backing up to an external USB drive or a DVD burner or a tape drive offers you not only a backup but also the opportunity to put that data somewhere else - such as in a fireproof safe, or your neighbor's garage, or somewhere other than right next to your computer - just in case something happens to your place, God forbid.

Freezing drives rarely works in getting the data back if it's mechanically busted, at least with the modern drives. That worked 10-15 years ago because what usually died in those older hard drives were the bearings - the grease would overheat and form into a glue - and freezing the drive caused that glue to become brittle, and when you powered on the drive it would break into tiny little pieces and the bearing could turn - which allowed the drive to turn. The problem is now you have tiny little sharp frozen chards flying around inside the drive so you have to copy the data off as fast as possible before those chards start to scrape the magnetic media off the disk platters.

Newer drives use a totally different type of grease that you can't freeze, at least not in an ordinary freezer. It also doesn't overcook and turn to glue.

Most modern hard drives that fail are rarely due to mechanical reasons believe it or not, they actually got tolerances so tight and precise the mechanisms tend to last a very long time - what goes is the electronics mounted on the bottom of the drive - they're far more sensitive to static electricity than they used to be, and also very sensitive about temperature because of the chip/transister density involved in making that drive board.

As always, progress has been made to solve problems but introduces other problems.

Anyway, for the future, I highly recommend a two-drive raid 1 USB box at a minimum for your music data. Put your OS and applications on your PC's hard drive, and all your important data on the external, mirrored drive.

Then if your PC crashes and all you have to do is reinstall your PC, the applications, and plug this external drive back in and you're up and running.
 
witzendoz said:
3) Screen springs into life, can't get from dos to start up screen, software problem or dead hard drive.
Click to expand...

Windows wouldn't boot anymore, the only thing I could see was the HP logo and I couldn't do anything such as going in the boot section.

I tried several things like others mentionned (except for the freezer, I heard that too, but it was too wierd enough). I plugged it in another working computer and the result was the same. I plugged it as a slave too, but wasn't working again.

Anyway, thanks for all the advices. In my case, I had my lesson, I won't pay. I'll redo everything. Anyway, I know where I'm going with all my equipment now. All the songs I recorded were kind of "experimenting with my new equipment", although they were good quality songs and I didn't want to record them again.
 
oceanflame said:
Windows wouldn't boot anymore, the only thing I could see was the HP logo and I couldn't do anything such as going in the boot section.

I tried several things like others mentionned (except for the freezer, I heard that too, but it was too wierd enough). I plugged it in another working computer and the result was the same. I plugged it as a slave too, but wasn't working again.

Anyway, thanks for all the advices. In my case, I had my lesson, I won't pay. I'll redo everything. Anyway, I know where I'm going with all my equipment now. All the songs I recorded were kind of "experimenting with my new equipment", although they were good quality songs and I didn't want to record them again.
Click to expand...

I'd still try the linux live cd...
 
There's few things worse than losing data.....I have nothing useful so I'll just hopefully entertain you with a story just to let you know you're not alone in this world ! Sorry that this is off topic.
I write songs in a most haphazard way. I'll have the basic outline but things like vocal melodies, instrument melodies and parts, drum and conga rhythms and the like, these can come at any moment and usually unexpectedly so some years back, I took to carrying a dictaphone with me. I've come up with literally thousands of parts as I've been driving, bathing, cooking, half asleep, watching TV, whatever. It could run at half speed so a one hour micro tape would last two hours. I have loads of these. And if I don't happen to have the dicta with me and a piece comes, I'd phone home and hum into the answering machine.
Anyway......when we moved into our present flat, seven years ago, I used to keep my dictaphone on the window sill and pick it up as I left on my way to work. It was high enough for my oldest son, then 18 months, not to be able to reach it. One morning I left the flat and halfway to my van (about 20 steps from the door !) I realized I'd left it but I thought, oh well, the lad won't be able to get to it and I couldn't be bothered to go back for it and I figured I'd deliberately block out any inspiration that might come my way.
Well, when I got home...........my wife looked really apprehensive. It turned out she'd left a stool next to the wall and my son had climbed it, manouvered to the sill, whipped up the dictaphone, played about, discovered the eject function, got the tape and pulled it all out and twisted and snapped it ! There was almost a whole year's worth of ideas on it ! I need to stick them on a dictaphone because I'll never remember them all. I was so mortified that I couldn't even be upset. It was after all my fault for not going back for it. It would've taken 15 seconds......
I did try to repair it, thinking I could maybe salvage a few bits. But when I tried to play the tape, it just whirred and ground to a halt. It took me ages as well to do all that splicing and glueing.
So all those ideas were lost to history and I'll never remember whether the resulting songs were better or worse with the new bits I had to come up with.
But come up with new bits I did. So you can re-record.
They may well turn out better than the ones you may have {see, I'm being positive} lost.
By the way, if I were in your position, whether I would pay for restoration would depend on how I felt about the songs. If I'd always felt they were keepers, maybe I would.
 
I'd try taking the hard drive out of the computer and putting it in an external case and trying it with another computer.

If it doesn't work I wouldn't be against wacking the thing a couple of times, just knocking it against a table. Sometimes the head is stuck.

I have two hard drives in my computer and when I do projects I save to both.
 
This just happened to me too! Computer wouldn't get past the boot screen, wouldn't allow booting from any external devices or CD/DVD either.

I narrowed it down to a faulty SATA drive (only a few months old!) Something got messed up somehow. (heh and now the same thing is happening to my car, but that's another story.....) I took the drive out and everything is working fine. Thankfully, it wasn't my OS drive. Unfortunately it was my projects drive :(


If your problem turns out to be the hard drive, check with the hard drive manufacturer. My drive is a 2 month old 500GB Western Digital and they have a 3-year warranty. So on payday I'll be shipping it back for a new one.


Remember: Make backups often!
 
Jeff_D said:
I'd still try the linux live cd...
Click to expand...

Too late I guess, my computer was already on the way to be fix since I had an extended 1 year warranty. If I knew this a day earlier I made this thread, I would have try. But anyway, the drive was broken physically (don't ask me how it happened...).
 
dintymoore said:
I'd try taking the hard drive out of the computer and putting it in an external case and trying it with another computer.
Click to expand...

I tried, but didn't work.

dintymoore said:
If it doesn't work I wouldn't be against wacking the thing a couple of times, just knocking it against a table. Sometimes the head is stuck.
Click to expand...

That's what I wanted to do.

dintymoore said:
I have two hard drives in my computer and when I do projects I save to both.
Click to expand...

That's what I'll probably do next time.
 
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