HDD failure: nearly cr@**ed myself

[redcolours]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

it wouldnt have been such a big deal that my hard drive crashed, but it contained ALL of the pictures ive taken the past several years. and i had NO BACKUP for this one!

110GB worth, a total of 109,809 pics.

thats not even counting the important documents in digital format.

nevermind the 30GB+ song library, i can always rip my CDs again. nevermind the downloaded apps, google is your friend.

but the pics... OMFG, THE PICS!!!!

i was gonna cry like a little girl, and was already checking my bank account for how much i have to shell out for data recovery. Fk my budget, I will do ANYTHING to get all those precious memories back.


but [Professor Farnsworth] good news, everyone![/Professor Farnsworth]

short story: i got the drive working again, and i am now in the process of backing up to my main drive, and later on also to several DVDs.

WHEW!

long story:
i was going to "expand" my mainpc from a SFF to a full size ATX case. I was transfering my 3 hard drives, videocard, and RAM over to a bigger mobo, but the damn thing wont display. So ehh, the mobo must be shot, so i decided to put back the SFF PC, figured id just go and make that core2 duo PC later next month.
Everything was fine until i tried to boot up - it just hangs at the BIOS screen. WTF? After about an hour of swapping drives, i found the issue - one of the drives isnt getting recognized, and thats where it hangs.
MTHRFKR! its the drive with all the pics! It spins, no signs of the click of death, no burnt smell, just a nice whirr... AAAHHH! this was almost panic mode, but i decide to check if its something else. I turned it over, and compared it to another identical drive. after just a few minutes i saw it - one resistor (or was that a capacitor?) was skewed a bit.

[adam savage]Well, there's your problem![/adam savage]

So gingerly with a small pointed skewer stick i nudged the little tiny resistor back into place, hoping it doesnt break off and comes in contact with the other end. When it looked straight enough, i immediately BUT CAREFULLY plugged it in to the IDE ribbon and the molex, and turned the PC on (the guts are hanging out at this point). sure enough it booted up straight with no more hang - IT WORKED!!!

One more thing i prayed for was that the drive would still be recognized with all its contents. My prayers were answered, and after only a couple minutes of checking how much space i needed, i began copying the pictures folder over to the main drive.

double whew! I dodged a bullet on this one.

So let this be a lesson to all you kids out there:

1) PROTECT YOUR HARD DRIVES! when you take them out of the case, treat it like a precious infant. especially the underside where its all exposed - put some hard cardboard to cover it, and put it in an anti-static bag right away! the drive, not the infant.

2) BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP!!!! you read that 3 times, cuz that means backup 3 times.
[that movie announcer guy] because in a world of fragile failing drives, backups never mean wasted space. [/that movie announcer guy]
besides, with 500GB drives costing only $120 now, and DVD burners and DVD media being so cheap, there simply is no excuse for no backups.

[Devhux]

Glad to hear this had a happy ending. Several years ago, I actually DID lose several very important photos (such as the last pictures I have when my grandmother made her last trip here in 2001).

Sadly, this wasn't enough to teach me a lesson: A few months ago, I actually had the click of death occur on my only drive at the time (a 500GB Western Digital RE2 drive). I nearly freaked out, as I didn't have a backup either (and the drive was filled with media).

Luckily after turning the PC off and waiting a few minutes, the drive started working again, and at that point I borrowed 3 external drives from friends so I could back up my data. Received a new drive via Western Digital as the old one did show errors in diagnostics, and breathed a sigh of relief that I didn't lose anything.

Now I'm running a RAID 5 array consisting of 4 x 500GB Maxtor Maxline Pro HDD's (and that's not counting my OS drive). This will eventually be migrated over to a dedicated media / file server.

[Butch]

Yup, all my photos are backed up in a few places. I'd lose my sh** if I were to lose them!

It's frustrating, though, because my DVD-burner seems to have crapped out, and I'm now out of disk space and don't want to buy more disk space while I'm abroad. I won't head back to the US until November.

Bought hosting space, so I'm going to upload them to that in the meantime.

Nonetheless, I feel a little vulnerable with the photos now.

[Jeffbx]

Yeah, sadly most people don't make a backup of anything until after the lose data for the 1st time. I've seen it time & time again.

And one quick tip - Redcolors, you would still have another chance at recovering that data even if that resistor had snapped off entirely. One (expensive) method used at those data recovery places is to replace the circuit board on the drive. If you find yourself another IDENTICAL drive, you can actually swap the circuit boards.

If you have a dead drive laying around, give it a try. They make the boards removable for this very reason.

[Markel]

After nearly losing my pictures to a DeathStar failure, I started burning the picture folder to DVDs. In some cases, I use a re-writable so I can "refresh" the image when I add more pictures to the hard drive. Yeah, I think those pictures are one of the most important things to keep - a lot of other things can be reproduced, but most of those pictures are irreplaceable.

I do make an occasional backup image of my hard drive as well.

[ray]

Of all the files on my computer, the photos are the one thing I regularly backup. Glad you were able to get the drive working so you could back it up.

[Cubsfan]

I had a similar thing happen to me. Now all of my data is backed up both to an external hard drive as well at to: http://www.carbonite.com/ So far it's worked, but then again, I've never had to recover files from them either :)