|
|
|
way
New Member
USA
35 Posts |
 Posted - 01/24/2005 : 11:18:36 [Permalink]
|
Based on that description, Dr., I think you're right. The drive is toast. That said though, I have very rarely gotten a drive making such sounds to spin up by ... hold on to your hat ... tapping on it while it is attempting to spin up. And, I mean tapping with something like the end of a screwdriver. Something to basically jar the inards just in case it is a stuck servo or something. Sometimes you get lucky. You need to have the drive in a machine that could then copy everything off onto another drive. You probably wouldn't get lucky twice.
As for data recovery on a drive reporting bad sectors, I've had great success using SpinRite from Gibson Research. www.grc.com
|
 |
|
|
tomk80
SFN Regular
Netherlands
1278 Posts |
Posted - 01/24/2005 : 15:54:31 [Permalink]
|
quote:
Originally posted by way
Based on that description, Dr., I think you're right. The drive is toast. That said though, I have very rarely gotten a drive making such sounds to spin up by ... hold on to your hat ... tapping on it while it is attempting to spin up. And, I mean tapping with something like the end of a screwdriver.
That sounds like a real 'virtua McGuyver'. If it would've kept on running after you'd have stuck some ducktape on it, we could make a new series centered around you. |
Tom
`Contrariwise,' continued Tweedledee, `if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.'
-Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Caroll- |
|
|
|
woolytoad
Skeptic Friend
313 Posts |
Posted - 01/24/2005 : 16:02:09 [Permalink]
|
quote:
Originally posted by Dr. Mabuse
Edited to add: It was an IBM (Hitachi) DeskStar. Together with my girlfriend, we've had 3 out of 5 DeskStar drives fail on us. I will never buy such junk again. Seagate has never failed on me.
Seagate has failed on me. IBM has never.
quote:
That sounds like a real 'virtua McGuyver'.
Naw. He just knows what he's doing ... I think. Back in the good old days when HDs were extremely huge, one of the recommended methods to fix your drive was to drop it from a short distance. This would have the same effect as way describes. |
|
|
|
Maverick
Skeptic Friend
Sweden
385 Posts |
Posted - 01/26/2005 : 14:06:57 [Permalink]
|
I better start making some more backups, been several months since the last one. I have too much to lose really. Luckily I've never had a harddrive crash on me. The most serious incidents have included a virus that encrypted parts of the HDD on each reboot or something.
Actually now when I think of it, one harddrive did crash at work, but it wasn't a real crash apparently, it just corrupted the FAT, but it still took a while to restore the important files.
If anything happens to my HDDs at home, I'm not sure what to do. It will take ages to find all the music and movies and everything. Not to mention personal documents and stuff. Right, tomorrow I'm buying some CD-R's. |
"Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of this astonishing universe, and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy." -- Carl Sagan |
| Edited by - Maverick on 01/26/2005 14:07:54 |
|
|
|
Siberia
SFN Addict
Brazil
2322 Posts |
Posted - 01/26/2005 : 15:20:02 [Permalink]
|
| I never had a computer crash on me, except the cd-rom dying. And I had a truly ancient motherboard. |
"Why are you afraid of something you're not even sure exists?"
- The Kovenant, Via Negativa
"People who don't like their beliefs being laughed at shouldn't have such funny beliefs."
-- unknown
|
|
|
|
Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
Posted - 01/28/2005 : 19:11:08 [Permalink]
|
Mab, if you've got the spare change, look around for data-recovery services. The pricey ones will go so far as to put the platters from your drive into an entirely new drive, just to get the data off.
I read a story many years ago about one data-recovery operation which recovered the data from a few hundred 5.25" floppies for a secretary of some company. She sent them back, as she still couldn't get them to work. But the recovery folks noticed that each of the new floppies was slightly bent. And each one bore a new, typewritten label. You guessed it: the first thing the secretary did with the recovered floppies was to slap a blank label on them, put them in her typewriter, and type onto it the company name and date.
That's even better than the story of the guy who stored his floppies by pinning them to the side of his filing cabinet with refrigerator magnets.
And speaking of floppies, back 20 years ago or so, a friend of mine and I had written this great computer game, and we kept on adding to it and rewriting it ('cause we ran up against the 64K memory limit on his machine) over the course of a year. I went to visit my dad for a few weeks, and my friend called me up to tell me that the worst had happened: we'd saved and saved and saved that one source file so many times that the floppy drive heads had worn through the Verbatim floppy we'd been using. Physically cut the floppy in half, circularly. Backup? Us kids? Fah!
But the best computer failure story I've got is this (and it sorta gets around to the OP, too):
My roommates and I had been playing a game called "Escape from Hell" for weeks, back in the late '80s. We were doing pretty well, and would often play for hours at a time, taking turns at the keyboard with the others making suggestions. One night, my roommate Fred and I were playing, and we got to Hell's Jail. The object was to sneak around the guards, 'cause if they figured out you were there, they'd toast you with little effort.
So, we go into the jail a second time (we were, of course, blown to pieces the first time). I start navigating our little guy around the guards, getting deeper into the place, and I remember thinking "damn, this is easier than I thought" just as Fred said, "well, this looks easier than I thought it would be." And then, all of a sudden, the computer screen went black, I heard a sizzling sound, and smoke starting coming out of the machine, right above where the hard drive was mounted!
After smacking the power button on the surge suppressor, I sat back, and looked at Fred. "I guess Satan was getting pissed at us," I said. Fred managed to stop laughing a few minutes later.
The next day, I disassembled the machine, and couldn't find a damn thing wrong with the drive. At least not obviously wrong - no scorch marks or anything. So I took the motherboard back to the place I'd bought it, and asked them to look at it for me, since the machine wouldn't do anything, with or without the drive installed. They brought it back out to me in ten minutes, telling me it was fixed. "What was wrong?" I asked. "Oh, one of the capacitors had been installed backwards, and blew. We replaced it." I'd purchased the motherboard five months before this incident. I'd never known an improperly-installed cap to wait five months before exploding... |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
|
|
|
Dr. Mabuse
Septic Fiend
Sweden
9688 Posts |
Posted - 01/29/2005 : 16:38:01 [Permalink]
|
Electrolytes can survive a while if they are mounted the wrong way.
But most of them do not survive getting plugged directly into a wall socket, I can assure you.
And, phew, the smell...
 "Straigh from Satan's bottom!
|
Dr. Mabuse - "When the going gets tough, the tough get Duct-tape..."
Dr. Mabuse whisper.mp3
"Equivocation is not just a job, for a creationist it's a way of life..." Dr. Mabuse
Support American Troops in Iraq:
Send them unarmed civilians for target practice..
Collateralmurder. |
| Edited by - Dr. Mabuse on 01/30/2005 05:42:10 |
|
|
|
Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
Posted - 01/30/2005 : 01:53:14 [Permalink]
|
'Twas a tantalum. Looked like one of these guys, but I don't remember the manufacturer.
One of the guys at work, many years ago, stuck a cap into a power strip, and then turned the strip on, just for fun. Boom! He went back to work, but soon found his office filling with smoke. Seems a small piece of the cap landed in a box of tissues, and set it on fire. Luckily, he kept a bottle of water in there for his fern, but he still spent some time spraying odor neutralizer up and down the hallway, trying to cover the smoke smell. |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
|
|
|
Chippewa
SFN Regular
USA
1496 Posts |
Posted - 01/30/2005 : 02:49:44 [Permalink]
|
quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.
'Twas a tantalum...
Just a footnote to all this:
Years ago my dad and sister worked for a company that made tantalum capacitors. It was a dull gray powder, (that cost about $70.00 an ounce!) but when compressed into a raw capacitor, before being coated and labeled, they were very beautiful luminous colors. Kind of translucent. Aside from its uses in electronics and aviation, tantalum is harmless to the human body and so often used in surgical equipment. My sister was allowed to bring home rejected capacitors, and she made jewelry and ear rings out of them.
|
|
|
|
Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
|
 |
|
|
|
Topic Locked
