Author Topic: Got bit in the ASS! (Read 6717 times)

seaweb11 · « **on:** November 23, 2009, 04:20:49 PM »

FRI Night,
Just as I was saving some of my important files into a memory stick.
The Hard Drive on my Computer stopped spinning!!!

I'm on a 5+ year old Powerbook tonight that crashes every 30 mins.
I took the ferry on Sat and drove the 1 -1/2 hours out to the Mac guys on VanIsland and left it with them.

Monday now and they can't retrieve anything from the past 15 years, including what info was on the memory stick before hand. company financials, web client databases, never mind every bookmark, photo, letter etc.

Now we get to the BIT IN THE ASS PAINFUL PART.
I have Today sent the broken one to a company in Vancouver to a called Aceon Data:

$400-750 if its not completely snackerd and it takes just a few hours.
$1000-1500 if they have to take it into the "clean room"

I'm lost now in a sci-fi flick and I can't get out

The interesting thing is, my new web site I have been building has a great deal of the data I will need to start anew now that it has been stored in a different place. Funny how things work some times....I'm still so F8Ck*d

BobbyR · « **Reply #1 on:** November 23, 2009, 04:46:36 PM »

Sorry to hear that. They charge a crapload of money for a recovery. When I worked for the IBM hardrive group that is the one part they wanted to eliminate. Considering it all it is amazing the HDDs work at all.

bucky katt · « **Reply #2 on:** November 23, 2009, 04:53:07 PM »

i finally had to learn to recover hard drive data myself once i got a dell, as every 8-10 months i lose a hard drive. i save really important stuff on dvd's weekly

manjisann · « **Reply #3 on:** November 23, 2009, 05:18:26 PM »

Sorry to hear this man. Hope it's the lesser of the two costs, not that it's pocket change either way

Brandon

Inigo Montoya · « **Reply #4 on:** November 23, 2009, 05:28:48 PM »

That is 1 bad thing about laptops. On a desktop you can at least raid the drives for mirroring to make redundant backups.

Alan F. · « **Reply #5 on:** November 23, 2009, 05:57:17 PM »

There are a few online backup services out there that are growing pretty quickly, prices I understand hover around the $15/month range.
Anyone with irreplaceable data might want to consider one of them just for peace of mind.
Computers suck!

mystic_1 · « **Reply #6 on:** November 23, 2009, 06:10:31 PM »

This is why IT people are constantly telling users to make backups.

This is the epitome of the saying "Don't put all of your eggs in one basket."

Doesn't make it any less painfull when it happens, but we only have ourselves to blame for data loss, really.

mystic_1

clarkjh · « **Reply #7 on:** November 23, 2009, 06:23:09 PM »

Now that sucks. I know a bit on how you feel. I spanned a volume and had a drive die, not RAID. I never did find another drive that I could swap the platters into to remount the volume and retrieve my data.

James

Gregorymoto · « **Reply #8 on:** November 23, 2009, 07:10:54 PM »

Thanks man, I might have the same g4 that is 4 years old. I'm going to back my #$%* up....
Sorry for you pain. I hear you. I lost a bunch of stuff in a fire once and it felt like i was always grabbing for something and then being all FUUUUUUUCKCK. It's all gone.

myhondas · « **Reply #9 on:** November 23, 2009, 07:19:40 PM »

Derek, that's the pits.....I have the ballcap and the tee shirt. What I did was to get a large external harddrive and I use a program called Ghost. Backs the internal HD's every day. I have had two HD crashes and neither was good. First was a physical crash and the other was software. I was to recover 99.9% on the physical and 100% on the soft one. Program was about $70 and the external HD was $179 for a terrabyte .

MacM2010 · « **Reply #10 on:** November 23, 2009, 07:36:55 PM »

I'm really sorry, man - the same thing happened to me last year. It sucked even more because I was 2/3 of the way through backing up (for the first time) when it all came crashing down. This sounds mechanical, so my software-options probably won't help, but if you want to try diskwarrior or something like that, let me know and I'll send you my copy.

andy750 · « **Reply #11 on:** November 23, 2009, 08:01:09 PM »

Timely reminder that I must back up my laptop!!

Sorry to hear about your crash and hopefully the data guys will recover it.

Good luck!
Andy

Steve F · « **Reply #12 on:** November 23, 2009, 08:15:00 PM »

Quote from: myhondas on November 23, 2009, 07:19:40 PM

Derek, that's the pits.....I have the ballcap and the tee shirt. What I did was to get a large external harddrive and I use a program called Ghost. Backs the internal HD's every day. I have had two HD crashes and neither was good. First was a physical crash and the other was software. I was to recover 99.9% on the physical and 100% on the soft one. Program was about $70 and the external HD was $179 for a terrabyte .

What program do you use? I just tried installing a 320GB external USB HD and it comes with sync software, but not quite what I had in mind. I'd like to totally backup everything. The present internal HD has only 35GB used.
Steve F

Duke McDukiedook · « **Reply #13 on:** November 23, 2009, 08:20:53 PM »

1TB backup drive, they go for like $100US now.

I know, I know, a bit after the fact...

Retro Rocket · « **Reply #14 on:** November 23, 2009, 11:55:01 PM »

Quote from: Dukiedook on November 23, 2009, 08:20:53 PM

1TB backup drive, they go for like $100US now.

I know, I know, a bit after the fact...

Spot on Dukie, i bought a 1 TB portable HD just a few weeks ago and had just transferred everything over { except my bookmarks...

} and my system Sh1t itself, phew, thank god for that..!! They are only $80 dollars here now and brilliant insurance. I have managed to bodge up my old computer for now although it crashes regularly , hope Santa is listening.....

seaweb11 · « **Reply #15 on:** November 24, 2009, 12:10:10 AM »

From what I have learned, the process of saving huge amounts of data at once is probably what gave the hard drive it's final push over the cliff. Sounds like a few of you had similar results.

That's it I'm never saving anything again

Duke McDukiedook · « **Reply #16 on:** November 24, 2009, 12:41:52 AM »

Plus the fact that laptops only have a design life of 2 years might have worked into that equation.
.

Hush · « **Reply #17 on:** November 24, 2009, 12:43:36 AM »

My old PC started getting glitchy so I lashed out and bought a whole new system only I really have some stuff (5 books I have written) on my old PC but even spending $200 on cables and a KVM switch unit I still can't get them to talk to each other.
PC's like women....can't live with them...can't live without them!!!!

Retro Rocket · « **Reply #18 on:** November 24, 2009, 02:07:50 AM »

Quote from: Hush on November 24, 2009, 12:43:36 AM

My old PC started getting glitchy so I lashed out and bought a whole new system only I really have some stuff (5 books I have written) on my old PC but even spending $200 on cables and a KVM switch unit I still can't get them to talk to each other.
PC's like women....can't live with them...can't live without them!!!!

And if they didn't have something you wanted they would be stacked 10 high at the dump....

That was the clean version......

Mick

bucky katt · « **Reply #19 on:** November 24, 2009, 03:03:01 AM »

i keep an external hd enclosure and after loading a new drive with the OS and drivers i then connect the old one with bad sectors and move the data file by file, staying away from the sector the problem is in. i just set the bad drive as a slave and it just shows up as another drive in the "my computer" section. you might want to try spin-rite on the drive as well.

Raul CB750K1 · « **Reply #20 on:** November 24, 2009, 03:42:42 AM »

This is the way I work with data:

My laptop has an 80 Gb HD. There I store the documents I work with and the family pictures. That's the info I don't want to lose under any circumstance.

I don't store anything in CD or DVD, I don't trust they will survive or will be readable when the times come.

I have an external HD, 500 Gb, connected to the USB. It is a bit slow but I don't use it much. I have two partitions, 250 Gb each. In one is where I keep a copy of the family pictures, music, and documents in general that I don't need often but want to keep handy. In the other partition I keep big files that I don't mind if I lose -i.e. movies-

I use Microsoft SyncToySet to make a mirror every month or so. In the external drive, in the first partition, I back up the family pictures of the laptop HD, along with "My documents", "Desktop" etc. The same day, I switch on a second external hard drive -250 Gb-, and make a full copy of the partition. Thus, my family pictures are stored in the laptop HD, external HD partition, and another HD that is switched off all the time but when the time for mirroring comes-. Then, it takes two catastrophes -laptop and external HD failures- or a virus to destroy the data in two of my hard drives, but I would still keep the third hard drive, and I would have only lost the pictures taken during the last month.

Sam Green Racing · « **Reply #21 on:** November 24, 2009, 05:01:28 AM »

I feel for you D, It's a shame you're not like me, to old to understand how computers work and how to store things, nothing stored, nothing lost.

Sam.

mystic_1 · « **Reply #22 on:** November 24, 2009, 06:04:57 AM »

Coincidently, there was just a news story this morning about failure rates in laptops. Fox news quoted figures of 31% failure overall with 20.4% due to hardware failure and the rest due to spills, drops, etc. They cited Toshiba and Acer as having the lowest failure rates.

Raul, sounds like you have a good plan going on there, the only thing I'd suggest is keeping your backups off-site (ie away from home) that way it'd REALLY take two disasters to kill all your data. Right now a fire or flood would still take everything out. You raise a good issue though about shelf life. Also, those of you burning to CD or DVD should make sure to verify your backups after writing.

mystic_1

Inigo Montoya · « **Reply #23 on:** November 24, 2009, 06:16:20 AM »

Toshiba makes good stuff but I would have to say some of the failure rate could come down if people handled their laptops like the expensive equipment it is. My current one is 4, almost 5 years old and aside from just using older ram and a single cpu, it works great. I see some people bring in laptops and you wonder if they were playing Frisbee with the thing! Then they get pissed when it dies! Now I am not saying that happened in this case but I bet we all know someone who is less than gentle on their laptop handling.

andy750 · « **Reply #24 on:** November 24, 2009, 06:17:19 AM »

Mystic,

I saw this report as well. It concurs with my personal experience with Toshiba laptops - only brand I have ever bought for laptops. Had 3 now. First one lasted 4 years and second one is 3 years and going strong....Toshiba Satellite in all cases upgraded to max RAM etc...they have their quirks but I have had good success with them. Battery life is terrible but I use it mainly as a desktop and use it ever day for work.

I would never buy a DELL, Sony or HP for work purposes.

**Edit - +1 on Indigos comments above...

cheers
Andy

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Author Topic: Got bit in the ASS! (Read 6717 times)