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Primary HARD DRIVE failure...!!!
RayB:
Sometimes it's just a weak power supply. Have you done everything you can to trouble-shoot it before declaring it dead?
(Action Front data recovery in Toronto can recover data for as low as $500 canadian)
RB
krick:
I recently bought a 120GB Seagate drive from CompUSA that failed 4 hours after installed it. Unfortunately, it failed as I was moving about 30GB of data to it. Notice that I said moving not copying. When you move files, they are deleted from the original.
Luckily, I realized what happened and quickly turned off my computer.
When files are deleted, they are not erased, the file system just removes them from the file table and marks the space on the drive that they occupied as "available".
Everything you do on your computer is writing files to the hard drive that may overwrite your data files if they are still there and may be recovered by using special software. Here's a free utility...
PC INSPECTOR File Recovery
http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm
When you lose files, the best thing to do is immediately shut down the computer, remove the hard drive, connect it as a secondary drive on another computer and run the file recovery software linked above on that computer to recover the files from your drive.
Using the process above, I was able to recover most of the files from my original drive. Some of the casualties were large VOB and CHD files that were over 1GB each. The larger the file, the more likely that one of it's clusters will be overwritten after it is deleted. Also, if you keep your drive thoroughly defragged, it's supposed to be less likely that writing to the drive will overwrite multiple deleted files.
The one big lesson I learned in this ordeal...
NEVER move files
ALWAYS copy files
...that way, if something goes wrong, you still have the original copy.
DaveJ-UK:
Seagate and Fujitsu drives SUCK. More than 3/4 failed drives I have seen have been Seagates or Fujitsus. They are about 20% cheaper than Maxtor/WD but it's not worth it. Quantum are supposed to be crappy but I haven't seen more of them fail than any other manufacturer. IBM aren't great either.
Moving large amounts of data is always a bad idea. If your PC hangs, even if you don't lose any data, you still have to either overwrite everything or keep clicking no no no no...
RAID is the best way to go. Saves you the hassle of writing to removable media and is always up to date. Althouth then you aren't covered for fire or theft. Having said that, how many of us store our backups outside our houses or in a fire proof safe?
sirwoogie:
Ehh. You know what, everybody has said "vendor XXX drives suck" at one point or another. The fact of the mater is, these are mechanical devices, and your mileage may vary. In my 15 years of computer-dom I have had one or more drives fail from ALL vendors. This includes IBM, WD, Maxtor, Quantum (now Maxtor), Hitachi, Seagate, Fujitsu. I have IDE, SATA, and SCSI interfaces, of all capacities, speeds, and traffic patterns. I have a 500Mb WD that has been in a computer for 8 years that gets turned on/off daily at least once or twice, and it still works perfectly. I have a 72G 15k Baracudda that lasted 2 days.
It's all luck of the draw. Each vendor at one time or another has bad drives, sometimes bad batches depending on time/place of manufacturing.
The key thing to concentrate on is resilience of your infrastructure. Whether you use RAID1/5 to provide it, or some offline storage medium (tape, optical, CD, CF). It all comes down to one things.... BACKUP you stuff if you want to keep it. If you you think it costs to much... then decide how much your frustration and time spent recovering is worth to you in dollars and act accordingly
walls83:
Speaking of backing up everything. Thats what I was in the process of doing. Then my hard drive started making a CLICKING noise and BOOM.. Ill check out that recovery site. I did get lucking in one part though I had some of it backed up but not everything.