HELP! Save my hard drive!!! - Striper Talk Striped Bass Fishing, Surfcasting, Boating

EricW · 09-26-2005, 08:48 PM

HI,

Setting it up as a slave drive is a good suggestion. Another way you can do that is with a usb external drive enclosure. Compusa has good one for 39.00 store brand. When you are done seeing if you can get any data off of your drive, you can use the usb drive as a backup. All you have to do is buy a new HD when they are on sale. I just picked up a 120 gig for 39. after rebates. THere are a ton of easy backup programs out there or just do a simple file copy yourself every month or so. Anyway, If when you plug the drive in and it spins up, if you can hear it spin up and make some light tick tick tick tick tick tick you may be in good shape. If when it spins up you hear some clanky, or louder not rythmic clicks or clacks, you have a head problem and the only safe way to get data off of the drive is to send it to a recovery place. That will be anywhere from 500 to 1000.
Since you got the blue screen of death they way you described, in my experiences there may be some hope of hooking it up to another pc or usb. Some files that windows needed may have gotten corrupted.
There are a couple of last ditch and I mean last ditch methods. One is to put the drive in the freezer for a while and try to spin it up. Don't know why this works, but I have heard it can. Another one is to hold it firmly in one hand and smack it down on a table. CAUTION: do not try those unless you are ready to throw the drive away. They haven't worked for me, but you never know.

Good luck,

Eric

EricW · 09-26-2005, 09:13 PM

This page has 200 tips on hd revival. Good reference stuff.

http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-1035_11-5029761.html#

bassmaster · 09-29-2005, 10:08 AM

run raid 1

Young Salt · 09-29-2005, 08:57 PM

Eric welcome to s-b, and thx for the advice.
A guy i work with said the same thing......went to the comUstore and got the enclosure. and was able to get some data off the old drive, but some on some of the bigger folders, listed alphabetically i lost eveything after the letter d. the files just dont appear.
i pretty much coped everything that i could....thinking about trying the freezer method soon.

BM what exactly are raid disks? i read up on it a bit, from what *little* i understood the are a special type of hard drive (or backup discs) usually used on servers...and it still seemed you would need a specialist to recover the info anyway.

bassmaster · 10-02-2005, 07:49 AM

sorry bout your hd, that happend to me and i lost major pics of family and awsome fish pics.
`````````````````````````````````
raid is basicly running two hard drives
You can run raid in raid o that what i run on my gaming pc, easy way to say it is it wrights half the program to 1 drive and half to the other
Raid 1 is mirrored so if 1 drive goes down all you do is pop another in and it will automaticly right to the new drive
safe way to go you loose nothing.
im going to get another 250 gig for my 3.4 pc and run it in o
if you hace a good mobo You can run raid 0+1 and sutch.
if Yiu run raid u will need to reformat and windows will ask You if you want to run raid.....

Young Salt · 10-02-2005, 09:41 AM

My pics (what was MOST important) i backed up to disc in april, last time my computer was acting up. from there i was able to save about half of my new pictures from the old hard drive. I've lost nearly all of my music files, saved email, 2 1/2 years of fishing logs, my address book and the info in my calender.

When i get the new HD i will want to run the raid 1. Does it take alot of speed from your system?

bassmaster · 10-02-2005, 09:57 AM

nope not that i know of
what i do know is in raid o its faster
im running hd's that spin at 10,000 rpm though