URGENT Hard Drive Problem! HELP!

  • Thread starter Thread starter philbagg
  • Start date Start date
I remember GetDataBack as being good. It's not free, unfortunately.

BTW - I hope you're not doing this recovery work whilst booted from the faulty drive! :eek: Definitely a job for a bootable CD or second bootable hard drive.

By the way there does exist a utility called 'Unstoppable Copier' which is typically used with faulty removable media but may help with your copying problem - though I doubt if flags your data integrity as well as a proper recovery program.

According to the excellent techsupportalert site the best free recovery software is http://www.powerdatarecovery.com/
 
I tried different pieces of software, with a lot of problems. I eventually just ended up freezing the drive for about half an hour, running it from a USB adapter, and manually copying what I could to another drive. If the clicking started, and the copying task came to a halt, I had to disconnect the drive, reconnect, and skip over the bump.

Two culprits: Iron Maiden albums, on two separate locations of the drive. All the other music was fine. NWOBHM bastards :mad:

I managed to get most of my main stuff out. There was a lot of stuff on the drive I haven't sorted through, and I have a feeling I'll realise I'm missing something in a few months so I'm keeping the drive just in case I need to do another rescue mission :D

robdean said:
BTW - I hope you're not doing this recovery work whilst booted from the faulty drive! :eek: Definitely a job for a bootable CD or second bootable hard drive.
Click to expand...

I'm booted from a different hard drive ;)
 
fookin hell mate :( Ive lost two in the past year...hope you get it sorted
 
I'm glad that you seem to have extracted most of the data! I'm not the world's most meticulous backer-upper myself but I do a lot more of it following a couple of similar incidents... I'm very fond of my 1Tb Freecom USB hard drives...
 
Just for the record, Phil (and KC): Whose drives are croaking? I had a Maxtor go south on me a year or so ago. No prob with WD or Seagate...yet.


lou
 
Sky Blue Lou said:
Just for the record, Phil (and KC): Whose drives are croaking? I had a Maxtor go south on me a year or so ago. No prob with WD or Seagate...yet.


lou
Click to expand...

My external WD drive died last year, but has since been replaced (same case). And the internal drive in question ATM is a Samsung, and I recently had to replace my iPod hard drive (also samsung), but that had something to do with a Mac screwing it up every time I connected it to one.
 
kcearl said:
fookin hell mate :( Ive lost two in the past year...hope you get it sorted
Click to expand...

Fairly sorted. Coulda been a lot worse :o


robdean said:
I'm glad that you seem to have extracted most of the data! I'm not the world's most meticulous backer-upper myself but I do a lot more of it following a couple of similar incidents... I'm very fond of my 1Tb Freecom USB hard drives...
Click to expand...

I think I'll start backing up from now on :o I'll be investing in some hard drives.

Is there a way to set up a RAID system on Windows? I'm not even sure about how they work, but from the little I do know, it'd be easier than manually backing up every few days.
 
Dont bother with RAID. Just get a back up program with a scheduler and have it back up at night. I use Paragon (they have a free personal version)
 
RAID is a motherboard thing. OS don't matter. RAID 1 (mirror) is pretty slick if the mobo has it onboard. Don't ever do RAID 2 (stripe)!!!!*

*Not sure if the RAID numbers are correct but mirror is good, stripe not so for what we do.


lou
 
Sky Blue Lou said:
Just for the record, Phil (and KC): Whose drives are croaking? I had a Maxtor go south on me a year or so ago. No prob with WD or Seagate...yet.


lou
Click to expand...

a maxtor and a hitachi...but they both had a few years on them, around 5 years a piece I think

I replaced them with a seagate barracuda 1TB only to read that these have given up the ghost with folks pretty early so i back up everything...the 1TB wouldnt boot the other day, just took the power lead off and stuck it back on and it started...but Im well paranoid now :o
 
Fuckin' bleedin' edge technology. They all compete and we lose.


lou
 
Cooling components definately works, I got my truck home once by putting Ice on the ignition module every ten miniutes, strange but true. I just had a new Seagate HDD go. Replaced it with an SSD, which are supposed to have better life/QC. We'll see.
 
Sky Blue Lou said:
Just for the record, Phil (and KC): Whose drives are croaking?
Click to expand...

All of them. I've had failures from every brand. In my limited experience, Seagate seem to fail the most catastrophically (all data lost, just clicks because it can't read the control track before track 0; likely head preamp failure). IBM/Hitachi drives seem to fail the most gracefully (crapload of bad blocks). WD drives seem to fail the most noisily (head crash).

The only safe copy of your data is the fifth copy, stored offline in a concrete bunker somewhere below the salt flats of Utah. Always have backups. Notice the plural.

BTW, freezing drives doesn't help with most drive failures. Cooling drives generally works when heads are stuck to the disc and the disc can no longer spin up. It works because it causes the head arm to contract and pulls the head away from the disc....
 
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