3 replies to this topic

[Hans van der Maarel]

If anybody has any advice to share on resurrecting a hard drive, now would be a wonderful time... My Windows workstation finally bit the dust this morning (and unfortunately it'll be another week or so before my Mac Pro is delivered). I've taken out the 2 hard drives and hooked them up via a SATA-to-USB cradle. Works great on the C drive, not at all on the second one which unfortunately holds some project data that hadn't been backed up yet. Nothing really irreplaceable, but still quite a nuisance and if it's at all possible to get the data off of there, it'd make me a happy man.

It's an NTFS formatted drive, which in the Windows disc manager shows up as "foreign" (or something to that effect, I have a Dutch windows). According to the documentation it should be possible to mount that, but alas...

[Greg]

I assume you have tried software recovery? There is a peice of software that I have used called "Disk Doctor" it worked for me.

If that doesn't work, there is an old trick in the pc repair book.. put your drive in a ziplock bag, and put it in the freezer for an hour or two.. this causes the heads to contract a tiny bit, sometimes enough to retract from the plate until it heats up again. (should give you 5-10 mins of working time) I have done this successfully only once, but i managed to grab the files i needed before the drive was completely shot!

[frax]

How did the computer die? It wasn't that whatever malfunctioned (the motherboard) took the drive with him in his death... ?

[Hans van der Maarel]

How did the computer die? It wasn't that whatever malfunctioned (the motherboard) took the drive with him in his death... ?

Few months ago it started acting up. Random crashes, problems booting etc. I had planned to replace it in the first half of next year anyway, so I wasn't too concerned. Then the problems became worse. Last week I ordered the replacement, which should be coming next week or so.

Yesterday it wouldn't come back on after a hard reset. It got stuck while writing something to disk and even though I ran chkdsk afterwards, it had trouble seeing that drive. So I decided to pull them out and hook them up externally to my old pc (good think I kept that one around). Worked for the OS drive, so I could save my entire VNS install. Didn't work for the data drive. Fortunately I had already gotten into the habit of backing up project files to an external RAID drive on a fairly regular basis. So as it stands now, I think I lost the results of a few hours of experimenting on 2 projects. One is totally re-doable, the other one didn't yield any good results anyway. Also lost were a MySQL database with VMAP data. Not irreplaceable because I still have the original cd's. Just a bit of a nuisance... Then again, I probabely would have had to set that up again on the new machine anyway... Looks like the only thing that's truly lost is some of the google maps programming I've done. No big deal, the last time I did anything with that was over 2 years ago.