Drive Failures

[gmanyo]

What is your worst drive failure story?

 

I just caused a head crash on my hard drive in the dumbest way - I got pissed at something and hit my laptop. Not only is this incredibly embarrassing, but it was also amazingly avoidable. My last backup was probably 4 months ago.

 

On a similar topic, is there any way to read information off the disk after a head crash? I know you can pay like 600+ bucks to get it professionally done, but if the disk spins and the head reads, shouldn't you be able to get some of the information off? The weird thing with my drive is that if I open my computer with Disk Utility, I can still see it, along with the "Macintosh HD" drive, but I can't read the file system. It passes a few of the "verify" tests as well.

[Adieu]

Yeah, look around for a freeware or a torrented program designed to pull information off crashed drives. I've done it before and recovered a huge amount of stuff. When I did it before (years ago) you could sort by which file type you desired to recover and it would pull as many of those file types as it could find. You'll get a lot of shit you don't want like icons and things, but it's well worth the effort to recover the important data.

 

This may be helpful for you.

 

http://lifehacker.com/5982339/diy-data-recovery-tricks-for-when-your-hard-drive-goes-belly-up

[gmanyo]

Cool, I'll look into that. There's a chance my drive is still spinning and reading.

 

Adieu, you ever lost important info to a drive crash? I'll probably fail a class because of this one.

[Adieu]

I lost like my first 3 songs that I've ever done along with all of my earliest work in Reason on a hard drive. I don't know why, but I didn't try the same recovery process. I might still have the drive though in which case I'm going to attempt to pull more info off it. I did it before on an older drive which is the example I used.

 

I always have 1 or 2 back-ups now.

[mcbpete]

My last (and only to date) crash was at uni about 10 years ago. The puter was taking longer and longer to boot and would randomly freeze - then one day :

 

Invalid system disk
Replace the disk, and then press any key

Luckily it seemed that mainly only the booting section was destroyed so was able to get (almost) all the documents from it by putting it in an enclosure and plugging it in to another machine as a slave drive.

[NorthernFusion]

I thought this was about driving cars

[zkom]

I've had multiple hard drive failures at home and work, but once I lost a lot of code in a really stupid way. The PC was a flat desktop model and the cover was not on for some reason I can't remember. I was happily doing my stuff when a Windows manual from the shelf above the case dropped right on to the hard drive that was sitting uncovered inside the case..

 

*bam* rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffiiiiiiiiiiuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu......