Crashed HD

[johnridley]

Damn. Woke up this morning to a crashed hard drive on my main machine. I have a Ghost image of the boot drive from a couple of months ago, it'll do nicely, but the D: partition held some stuff I really hope I can retrieve, though I won't be heartbroken without it. Everyone needs a good fire once in a while.

The digital photos are on a separate drive, and are backed up monthly anyway, but there's a lot of downloaded to-be-archived crud that is now potentially lost.

I have a new 250G USB drive in hand to use as a backup. I'd bought it a couple of days ago, was using it at work as a temp drive, and today was the day I was going to bring it home and start backing up with it. Murphy, damn you, you win again!

Now it's off to the store to buy another 250. And eventually I'll get a warranty replacement for the 250 that just died.

Comments

spinrite

[bwittig.livejournal.com]

This week in Tech podcast & Security Now podcasts swear by Spinrite by Gibson Research for recovering data from crashed hard drives.

grc.com

It is $89, but Steve Gibson, the author, (and expert on Security Now podcast), has a money back guarantee. If it doesn't recover your data to your satisfaction, send it back for a full refund, no questions asked. It also has not copy protection or restrictive licensing, so you buy a copy and it is yours to work on any computer you need to use it on.

As I understand it, it keeps trying to read the data on a drive until it succeeds, even if it takes 2+days.

If you want your data back, give it a try, give it time and I bet it will work. Certainly no risk!

Re: spinrite

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I use a program called GetDataBack which works really well also.

I think in this case, either I'll be able to just read the data from the second partition, or I'm boned.

I suspect I'm boned. Spinrite isn't going to help when the BIOS doesn't recognize the hard drive, and it's just sitting there going clickity-click....clickity-click...clickity-click...

Re: spinrite

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Actually if nothing else works, I'll probably give it a try. What the heck.

Re: spinrite

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Spinrite utterly failed. It won't even boot to the CD with that drive in the system.
I'm hoping they send me an identical drive (Seagate 7200.9 250G) - if they do I'll swap the electronics out and give that a try - it failed so fast that I gotta believe it's an electronics failure. If so, I should be able to do a full read once that's sorted, but I'm not holding my breath.

Re: spinrite

[bwittig.livejournal.com]

Bummer. Yep, sounds like an electronics failure, all the recovery software in the world won't help.

Good luck on the electronics swap!