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Creative Data Loss
lewiz writes "An interesting article from the BBC about the crazy things people do when they accidentally delete files. Amazingly one guy froze his hard disk in an effort to retrieve files. Real men don't make backups... but, hell, who needs to if you can resurrect them from the dead ;)"
At least for a little bit? It's helped me recover data from other dead drives a number of times.
but Slashdot was beat out by Fark for god's sake.
Slow news day?
I had a witty well worded rsponse to this article but I forgot to hit 'submit'. Could the admins please recover it for me and place it in the first post position?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I wanted to make first post, but my hard drive was in the freezer.
Isn't total bollocks, as we say in Britain. The Fujitsu drives that were failing a couple of years ago could sometimes be revived long enough to back them up using this method. The fault was in the drive electronics, not the physical disk.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
most of these seem to be cases with laptops.
Maybe we should do a phychological analysis of people before we give them a laptop, otherwise they get the shock-absorbant desktop option.
But this is good news for the consumer electronics market, the increasing trend in computer abuse promises more sales!
I'm surprised to see this - a friend did this successfully to get his hard drive working for a while, and I've seen a fair amount of other people reporting success with it on the internet.
Anyone else?
I actually did that on a WD scsii hard drive last year. It failed on me and had important data on it. I wasn't willing to shill out a few hundred to a few grand to get it fixed, so I found a few articles commenting about how the clicking noise I was hearing was problems related to the mechanics of the drive and there was a chance I could salvage my hard drive by placing in the freezer.
I thought, "Well, the data is lost anyway, so why not?" I put it in a ziplock bag, so not to get the platters all frosty, and left it in overnight. I woke up the next morning and put it back into my computer, and wouldn't you know it, absolutly nothing except for the same clicking errors I heard the day before.
Thanks Internet, you've once again provided me with more information that I really needed.
I emailed BBC News Online about this fact - reducing the temperature of a drive can assist in some problems, but of course, there is a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it.
I've been able to get dead hard drives working again by throwing them on the concrete.
I personally HAVE recovered files using the freezer trick... I managed to salvage the data from a dead IBM Deathstar, a "click of death" WD 20 gigger, a 60gb maxtor which refused to spin up, and a 3.5gb maxtor which wouldnt come up in bios... I find it somewhat dumb that they are dissing the freezer trick, as for dying hdd's it actually works.
The myth on freezing is that if the head is stuck, contraction can make it come loose again. I had a drive that stopped responding last week and I did the freezer thing. It mounted one last time, just long enough for me to back it up. I don't know if it was the freezing or just powering it down for an hour, but it worked for me. Posting AC so the flames cant reach me, even in the freezer.
Freezing hard drives is actually a known method of fixing hard drives with "the click of death". Never tried it myself, but many people swear to it. Not only that, but I know people who have tried it and say it works. Perhaps the BBC should educate themselves before writing something off as stupid.
WASTE - The Secure P2P
I accidently sent my entire home directory to the recycle bin, and changed the drive letter it was on. I couldn't retrieve anything.
I particularly like the story regarding a steel girder that fell upon a laptop during the construction of a building.
The laptop contained the blueprints for the building......
I have no sig yet I must scream.
That has to be my favorite one in the article...I can't believe someone actually tried to flush their laptop down the toilet. That's all I can say. I can't believe, someone actually tried to flush their laptop down the toilet.
I'm lucky enough to be able to back up most of my stuff by just plainly copying it from my drive to my USB drive. Then I put my USB drive away. I do this every few months. I guess the smartest thing I can do is invest in a fireproof waterproof lock box, and stick it in an attic.
Every computer repair shop knows about this trick. Generally it's not done in a freezer, however, it's done with circuit cooler. This only works (obviously) if it's a problem with the circuit board and that the heads haven't in fact crashed or have some other mechanical problem. This works because it causes connections to expand and work for the temporary period that they're cold. You can also remove the circuit board from a working hard drive and swap it with the non-working hard drive for a permanent effect. If you have a head crash or other mechanical problem, generally you need the services of a clean room to retrieve the data.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Real men don't make backups... but, hell, who needs to if you can resurrect them from the dead
Well, I'm proud to use PGP Wipe (8.1) and a nuke or two when I need my files wiped, so... hopefully I'm one of those people that needs to make backups... fully encrypted, of course.
- dshaw
The funniest computer freezing experiment I have seen is this one. Still makes me giggle looking at the site....
I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born - Ronald Reagan
next time I see 'rpm conflict' I'LL KILL this computer!!!
oh, wait...
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
/. is just a hack of fark's OLD IT articles these days.
Yeah right, the only real reason I do not make good backups is that there is NO real good solution. How do you expect me to make a backup of 150GB of data? On 32 DVDs? No way, they just get lost and scratched. And I am never able to find anything back on that pile of DVDs.
An external hard disk is probably the only solution but not cheap either. Especially when you want to have an off site backup, you probably need 2 of them.
I once lost a year's worth of gnucash xml data, including all the backups (and gnucash makes plenty--a new one every time you use it!). I promptly used dd /dev/hda1|grep to search for markers that I knew would be in a gnucash file, and with a little shell scripting found the original and every single backup file in deleted space. After determining with a little more fancier grepping which blocks represented my most recently updated file, I recovered that, trimmed off a bit of the filesystem cruft around the edges, and had my file back.
:-)
Then I promptly set up a system to encrypt and email myself the most recent file, every day.
(Yes, I'm aware that there are programs that will do the same thing for me.)
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
They run a variation of this once a year or so, It is kind of like how magazines have the same crap over and over again on an annual basis - fitness magazines: GREAT ABS, Weekly World News: Loch Ness Monster spotted disembarking a UFO, Martha Stewart: Perfect Thanksgiving Doilies, PC World: VIDEO CARD SHOWDOWN, etc......
music lover since 1969
"Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it."
Although computer malfunctions remain the most common cause of file loss, data recovery experts say human behaviour still is to blame in many cases.
This "statistic" just sounds plain wrong based on my personal experience, as I've only one lost data by malfunction, but on many occasions I have accidentally deleted something.Can anyone confirm or deny that malfunction is the most common cause?
You've probably noticed that people's noses get bigger as they get older. That's because old people are huge liars.
One night I was up late doing a reinstall of Windows. So of course im tired, and blindly going through the setup and I accidently do a quick format of my development partition which contained projects I have been writing since the age of 13. After the installation finishes, I install MSVS and attempt to load up a project I was working on at the time-- after about 5 minutes of staring at an empty drive in shock a friend recommends a utility called "R-Studio". Luckily I was able to recover about 90% of my lost code thanks to this wonderful application. I will NEVER stay up until 3am without coffee again.
I use Apple's Backup software for automatic backups. It will backup files to my iDisk and Firewire drive automatically at different times of the day independent of each location. One backs everything online at 12am, the other at 2am. I then make sure everything has worked and perform a 3rd backup onto cd every month, using Backup again.
It even backs up the things you wouldn't normally backup, such as keychains and certain xml files and other hard to find peices of information which you do need, those include customisations made within programs.
I'm never gonna lose my porn stash ever!
Jonathanjk.com
Uhhuh? Are you working for the Department of Homeland Security or just trying to hide something from the authorities?
a rumor that computers like heat. I think I'll try it out by removing the fans from all of my machines... they ought to blaze away after that...
Their was a torrent on suprnova.org; titled something like "100 ways to revive your hard drive." It actually only contained variants of three methods, hit, drop it, or freeze it.
Yeah, you are correct; theirs absolutely no point to this post whatsoever. (except for maybe illustrating my abuse of the semi-colon)
If data can be resurrected from the dead, do I have to worry about it later reincarnating on someone else's new drive? That could be quite a security risk! How do I metaphysically protect my data?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
At the other extreme I have noticed that microwave ovens do little for the data integrity of CD-ROMs and other forms of optical storage.
This and other Public Service Announcements regarding microwave ovens can be found HERE
AT&ROFLMAO
Jouralist gets job done, can go home quickly, Ontrack get free ad, /. gets story. Everyone's a winner.
Wouldn't be the first time: http://news.google.com/news?q=ontrack
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
This got modded troll, but the funny thing is that the original article does say "A female user" as if that had significance. Most of the other stories in the article just say "A user." Can I mod the article -1 Flamebait?
A good colleague - Hi Ryan :) - who builds computers in his spare time left a brand new 80GB
hard drive on the roof nd drove off. It bounced a couple of times and got driven over. His mistake was to attempt to send it back for a warranty refund :) Not just women - it happens to all sorts
of people for all sorts of reasons :)
When my IBM Deskstar HD stopped working I blew it up, it was the only appropriate method of disposal I could think of.
I had two IBM death-stars and a Maxtor fail on me last year. The IBM's made that horrible clicky sound they are famous for, and the Maxtor just stopped spinning. I discovered by accident with the first IBM that if I turned it upside down and powered up the machine, I was able to access my data! It worked for the replacement IBM drive a few months later after it failed (bleh), and a Maxtor that had stopped spinning completly.
Doesn't work all the time, but worth a try. Anyone have any idea why it works at all?
"Oh God! I've killed alllll my poor porn! It's all gone. Every last one. Oh the mercy! Oooooooo...."
Table-ized A.I.
When I first read the headline, I thought it was reporting a major data loss incident at Creative Labs.
I thought, "Awww, that's too bad. Maybe they can use this as an opportunity to have competent software engineers rewrite their notoriously terrible drivers from scratch." Ah well, maybe next year.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
One thing of interest is that the article specifically highlighted the female user - whereas, for men, it was just a user.
The gender of the user in the list was already specified by the 'his/her', so I have no idea why they needed to specifically point out when the user was female.
Works well for a few hours, then it's back to its old tricks. Freezer spray doesn't work, oddly enough.
I've often fantasized about how cool it would be to deep freeze myself when I'm old, and wake up in the world of tomorrow (for better or worse). But I'd be worried about how my memories would survive the deep freeze.
Sorry if this seems a bit offtopic, but when you think about it, it IS related.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
At least it worked for me.
I has a 120G Maxtor harddrive that started making an awful clicking sound, then it would only work if it was placed on the side. Soon, it stopped working at all and the BIOS wouldn't recognize it properly.
After some googling, we sealed it in a vacuum bag and plastic box and froze it overnight. Then we left it at room temperature for about 15 minutes and hooked it up.
The damn worked! It worked for a whole day and lasted long enough for us to get everything off of the drive, Linux partitions, Windows partitions, the works.
The biggest problem is condensation as it heats up, but thankfully we avoided any shorts.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
once my modem just started to smell .. and i really needed net (many years ago i barely had access to broadband) ... .... .. so I was running back and forht the deepfreezer ... then reconnect until i had to go to chill again ....
.... a transformer blew .....
:(
... I do not want to see the condensation when you put it in a pc and turn it on next to a athlon 2800 with a slighly messed up fan ... must look like the peltier-s in mid summer ... loved how the whole mb just swam in water frying every single circuit exposed :)
anyway it was a discovery 14.4k external
I needed the connection fast
after many reconnects it just started to make a wierd electric short sound, and a thick smoke told me that freezing won't help anymore
I also remember freeze/cooling a wifi card with no success, that one I might have fried with an always overheating vaio pcmcia socket
cooling a hdd: to save data
I used to use DataKeeper to make realtime backups, but Powerquest (now taken over by Symantec) stopped developing/selling it years ago. More recently I came across File Journal (through a .sig link on /. IIRC) which does an even better job. I probably use it to recover or search through old source code a few times a week now. Very handy if you're a Windows user, don't know if there's a *nix version though.
Sheesh I feel old, all you kids here on Slashdot don't even know about stiction.
This really isn't a problem on modern drives, but in the past it would happen. Something that would work to unstick the drive head was to stick the drive into the freezer. This would (presumably by a slight contraction of the platters) allow the drive to spin up. Once the drive was warmed up and spinning, you could then proceed to back up as much of the data as possible before the drive failed.
Now, it's highly unlikely that the person mentioned in the FA had a drive that was suffering from stiction. Modern drives rarely have this problem.
More info here. (Warning: PDF)
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Seriously, the article was a disappointment. I mean, "woman left laptop on car and drove over it". My neice trashed a laptop the same way. I don't think she's unique; there must be thousands who've done this.
Just like another example they cited about people losing data by flushing their laptop - people drop their pdas, palmtops, cell phones, etc., into the john all the time.
My bet is that we'll see slashdot readers with better stories than the ones the BBC quoted.
This last category includes the case of a man who became so mad with his malfunctioning laptop that he threw it in the lavatory and flushed a couple of times.
OK, I'll try to salvage that woman's data, and you'll do the men's.
I have actually recovered data from my laptop after flushing it in the lavatory a couple times.
However, individuals and companies can avoid the hassle and stress this can cause by backing up data on a regular basis.
Well damn, how come nobody ever told me this before? It could have saved me all KINDS of grief!
I think most computer users are at least faintly aware that they need to backup their data. The problem is, they don't exactly where their "data" is, nor do they know how to "back it up". The only thing my Dad backs up on a regular basis is his Quicken file, and that's because Quicken makes it real easy to back the data up and nags you until you actually do it. Nothing else gets backed up until I go over and spend some time burning a few CDs.
I'd love to have Dad do his own backups, but I haven't seen a backup program that comes anywhere near to being simple enough and foolproof enough for me to unleash Dad on them. Would it be that hard to write a program that would be able to tell actual user data from program files or OS cruft, and keep track of how much new data there is, and prompt the user to stick a blank CD or DVD in the burner every week or so?
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
...left a brand new 80GB hard drive on the roof nd drove off. It bounced a couple of times and got driven over. His mistake was to attempt to send it back for a warranty refund :) ...
You'll only get a refund if you wipe the tread marks off first.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
for example the thermal shrinking can free heads sticking to the discs (the IBM problem). Or cold solder connections can work again.
Its no repair, but a good trick to try to get the drive running for a hour or two to backup everything.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
As a home based computer consultant, the freezer trick has been one of my favourite techniques for fixing up computers for years.
Hard drives that are on their way out due to mechanical failure often start struggling due to failed bearings, seized bearings, seized bushings, etc. Symptoms may be complete crash (hard drive appears to be dead), clicking noises, grinding noises, etc. The parts in question are all metal. I put one of those "do not eat" packets from computer parts on the bottom of the drive (these things are made to suck up moisture) to keep moisture off the circuit board, carefully wrap it in a dry towel, place in a ziploc baggie, and leave it in the freezer overnight. The temperature shifts the metal parts around a bit as they contract, usually allowing the drive to spin up and operate once again. It is only a temporary fix to get the data off the drive, and it's usually toast once again (and usually forever) once it spins down again. Thankfully I live in a very dry climate, but if I were in a humid area, I would think that condensation on a cold drive could cause other problems as well.
I've attached my Amiga harddrive to a PC at work. For a few days I've been succesfully using my home system by mounting the drive under linux as AFFS and then using the mounted directories as volumes under UAE, emulating Amiga just like the one I had at home. Then I got that idea of looking how does Windows see it.
I booted NT, Disk Manager and it displayed a requester with something along this lines:
"The drive contains invalid/corrupt signature and can't be read. Windows is about to write a correct signature. This is an absolutely safe operation and won't change the way of accessing the disk by other operating systems in any way. Do you wish to proceed?".
So, I clicked yes.
Result: 6 hours of recovering of erased Amiga partition table. Absolutely safe my ass, fucking Microsoft liars.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
...where you have to wait at least one hour and 57 minutes between seeing a story once and seeing it again...
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Whenever a drive is considered binable due to it dying, I always drop it from about 10 cms onto my desk. Occasionally, (if it's not down to electronics), it can jolt it back into life. Then it's boot from a Gentoo Live CD, and backup everything quickly over NFS.
A little gem I heard a while ago: There are 2 kinds of people. Those that have lost data, and those that will.
Get your own free personal location tracker
I think some form of RAID is the best backup solution. Sure, it isn't cheap, but when you're constantly backing something up, there's almost a guarantee that you won't lose data. The worst case scenario would be when one or both of your drives fails. If that happened, you could still get some data recovery. And by RAID I don't mean the striping of a RAID 0 solution. I mean something that actually has redundancy.
Just use rsync to duplicate your local volume to another local, but independent hard disk. Easy enough to do on *NIX with cron, and on Windows use the rsync in cygwin on a scheduled task. Hard disks are cheap these days, and this method gives you a fully local time delayed duplicate (so you can recover deleted files).
Advantages to this method:
One place I worked at, they had a problem where EVERY Monday morning, they'd have to recreate boot floppies for the PC/XT machines some of the secretaries were using. This went on a few weeks before one of the techs noticed something: said secretaries were 'storing' their boot floppies by affixing them to a nearby filing cabinet - with fridge magnets!
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
# A business woman spilt red wine over her laptop when she was showing a business partner some information after dinner.
Suuuuuuure that's what happened.
I just don't know what "doing a phycological analysis of people" would actually mean...
The owls are not what they seem
"I have no idea why they needed to specifically point out when the user was female." What if the user had been a drunk black amputee midget jew? You would pass up an opportunity like that?
... I get people in a panic come up to me and ask if I can restore a 'really important' file they deleted by accident.
"Yes, sure, what was it called?". "Ummm, I can't remember... it was an Excel spreadsheet. can you restore it?". "Well, I could if I know the name and location. What was it called and where was it?". "On K:\ drive. Excel spreadsheet - you know?".... ad naseum.
At this point one of my tray icons caught my attention... Google Desktop Search. I had been playing with it for a few days and remembered the caching functionality. I opened it up and did a search for the file. Magically, it appeared with a cache and the entire document, in all of it's glory.
This was proof enough for me that aside from the security concerns, desktop search tools do have distinct advantages. Especially instant backups :)
Anyone else notice how
A female user placed her laptop on top of her car while getting in. Forgetting about the laptop, it slid off the roof and she then reversed straight over it as she set off
mentions a female user and all the rest just mention a user, as if we could assume that a user would be male, and the fact that the user was female was too important to leave to pronouns to show?
While burning a CD in an IDE CDRW on Fedora Core 1, about 15 minutes before having to go catch a ferry to an important meeting at work...
The amazing thing is that after lots work, I managed to re-construct the home partition enough to save most of my data changed since the previous backup. As I'd over-written the partition table, this involved grepping the block device for "ReIsEr34" so I could find the block a certain number of sectors in from the beginning of the partition (16, I think, but I don't remember), then useing this information to re-build the partition table.
Shouldn't the title be Creative Data Recovery as these people tried to get their data back? It's easy to come up with creative ways of data loss. For example, with a thermite reaction. :)
Most people seem to be missing the point, he was trying to recover deleted files. There was nothing wrong with the hard drive. The sad thing is they were probably still in the trash bin and recoverable until he shut down the computer to remove the hard drive. It's more of a breaking off the cup holder/CD tray than a method of fixing a hard drive story.
The other members of my group didn't actively participate except minimally, so I don't feel bad about screwing them over.
Norweigan Ibas can help you, but expect to shell up $10,000 to have the contents of one harddisk recovered.
They are world's number one data recovery labratory.
www.ibas.com
$ cd ImportantStuff/
... this way will take forever
$ rm *
rm: remove file `important'? y
rm: remove file `do_not_delete'? y
rm: remove file `dont_remove_you_fucking_moron'? ^C
Shit! what am I doing?
$ rm -rf *
Thats done. Now, I better finish that project I've been working on for 3 years
$ cd ImportantProject/
bash: cd: ImportantProject: No such file or directory
Always store backups of key sectors of your HD on another medium, or at the very least print out your drive's geometry and partition table.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Never NEVER NEVER add or remove a PCI card while your MS-Windows XP system is hibernating.
On bootup you could royally screw your disk.
On one of my PC's, the power supply went haywire (and overvoltage) and most of the PC electronics was fried, including the hard-drive.
I was able to locate the same make/model of drive on Ebay, and when the new drive arrived, I installed the new drive's electronics onto the old drive... and I was able to get ALL my hard drive contents back.
I accedentally deleted a bunch of source files a few weeks ago. After pounding my fist on the desk for 10 minutes I googled for 'linux recover file' and found the 'recover' program:
http://recover.sourceforge.net/linux/recover/
To my amazement it actually worked 100%. I recovered all the files I deleted. Install that program, try a test run, and remember it so you can run it asap after deleting something by accedent. Those inodes are still there so if the blocks they point to aren't overwritten you can very likely recover those files.
Well, I was using kuickshow and was deleting some unneeded files through their browser and somehow deleted the wrong directory. Well, next thing I knew, the whole photo directory was empty! My wife was not happy.
But I managed to keep her from completely freaking out while explaining how I had the situation under control. Fortunately, since I was soothing her, I didn't have a chance to freak out about exactly how I was going to get control of the situation.
Well, after some googling, I figured out how to use grep on the hard drive device itself. So I opened one of my remaining pictures in emacs and saw some signature text at the beginning. I grepped the hard drive for this text string and returned the byte offset from the beginning of the hard drive for each match. Then I wrote a small C program to go to these locations and dump the next 5MB of data to a file. Then I openned up each of these files in emacs, and trimmed the beginning and end to match what a good jpeg looked like, and then openned it up in kuickshow.
Anyways, this whole process took me about three days. About 90% of the data recovery was done in about 4 hours on the final day. The rest of the time, was trying to figure out exactly how to do it.
And so I went from zero to hero with my wife. I learned some cool grep and C tricks. And it was pretty fun. We recovered about 80% of the pictures. I could only recover photos that were contiguous on the hard drive. I didn't know how to find all the fragments of non-contiguous files. But we had taken so many pictures that 80% was actually pretty good. We were very happy!
Lessons learned: [1] Don't use kuickshow browser (actually it was my fault, but I can't help but feel a prejudice now). [2] Always backup data to CD. I actually had a CD burner on my laptop, but I never got around to burning it yet.
The ultimate goal of science is to unify all forces of nature to a single law that can be silk-screened onto a T-shirt.
;o)
Where I've worked, I've seen:
Laptops:
1. Closing the lid with a pen on the keyboard - frequent issue. Cracks LCD pretty durn good. Repaired
2. Immersed in bathtub. DOA
3. Exposed to salt water from leaky porthole. DOA
4. Deep, fist-shaped dent in keyboard, failed HD, keyboard, pointer.DOA
5. Run over in driveway - "accident". DOA
Kybds/Meeces:
1. Watched mouse fly out of office and shatter against wall.DOA
2. Replaced user's keyboard due to "minor water spill" - while flirting w/ user, a "minor" ~5 oz of water drips out of lowest corner of wet keyboard case on to my pants leg.
Power:
1. Shipping clerk autonomously unplugs 16-proc SGI machine while it is rendering final 10% of movie's f/x frames - claims he was worried about "the Fire Marshall" and "extension cords" - he kept his job.
2. User contiinually spills coffee @ desk... iPAQ 866s have P/S on bottom. Fries P/S on 3 iPAQs before HR gets involved. (3x)DOA - Kept her job.
3. Bad P/S fan annoys user, so he encases PC in cardboard - with no ventilation. DOA.
The "freezer trick" is an age-old "last ditch" trick. As people have been saying, it is not intended to be a permanent fix, but rather, something that will get the drive running (or limping) long enough to get your data off of it.
One theory is that rapid temperature changes will cause some minor expansion and contraction of the components in the drive, which could be enough to un-stick a stuck mechanism.
Another theory says that if the problem is a bad connection (solder joint, etc.), the contraction caused by freezing it could re-make the connection (at least until it warms up again).
Still another theory says that bad ICs ("computer chips") are sometimes sensitive to thermal conditions, and cooling them down might revive them. (Again, until it warms up again.)
When all this fails, you can still send it off to the professionals. I like CBL Data Recovery Technologies. You ship them the drive. They give you a free quote. If you agree, they attempt the recovery. If they succeed, you pay up and get your data back. No data, no charge.
Companies like these will do things like try to repair bad components on a PCB, try replacing the PCB from an inventory they maintain, or removing the platters in a clean room and reading the data using special equipment. It ain't cheap, but they can sometimes work minor miracles.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
"I guess the smartest thing I can do is invest in a fireproof waterproof lock box, and stick it in an attic."
In all seriousness, the best thing "mere mortals" like us can do is likely invest in a safe deposit box at a bank, and maintain current copies (paper or electronic) of important stuff there. Bank vaults are reasonably secure against theft, fire, flood, and other threats.
I've also known people who have family or close friends nearby (but not too nearby), and swap disks and papers. Not a bank vault, but at least a structure fire at your residence won't be the end for your data.
On-site backups are better then nothing, but a serious structure fire, or a theft, or even a flood can still destroy everything. By keeping copies at a reasonable distance, you've practically eliminated any chance of major data loss.
With off-site copies, if something big enough to knock out both copies at once does happen, chances are, your backups are going to be the least of your worries.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
"A little gem I heard a while ago: There are 2 kinds of people. Those that have lost data, and those that will."
This is what I tell customers: There are two kinds of people in this world. Those who makes backups, and those who will end up wishing they had.
Worst data loss episode was a customer, a metal fabrication shop, who insisted that buying a tape backup drive for their brand new server would cost too much. Well, as (bad) luck would have it, the drive failed about a month of operation. They had already moved all of their CAD drawings to the server, and had no other useful copies. They blamed us, of course, and we parted ways under bad circumstances. So I don't really know what happened after that, but I did notice that the place went out of business almost immediately after.
Which leads to another of my favorite sayings: "If you think it costs a lot to do it right, just wait until you find out how much it costs to do it wrong."
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
"This went on a few weeks before one of the techs noticed something: said secretaries were 'storing' their boot floppies by affixing them to a nearby filing cabinet - with fridge magnets!"
Many years ago, in the days of the PC/XT, I knew a guy who had a 5.25-inch floppy disk, labeled "Emergency boot disk", stuck to his file cabinet with a gigantic red horse-shoe magnet.
First time I saw it, I stopped dead in my tracks and stared open-mouthed. After a few seconds, the guy says, "It's a joke".
Still cracks me up today.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I've never frozen a hard drive, but i have fixed one that looked like it was dead. It was getting bad sectors all over the place, and half the time it wouldn't even be recognized when it booted. I salvaged what I could off the drive, then I
/dev/random >> /dev/hdb
cat
can't explained how it fixed stuff, but haven't had any problems with the drive since, 6 months after the fact.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
While a large office was being constructed, a steel beam fell on a laptop that contained the plans for the building.
Harddrives are mechanical beasts and it is more likely to be problem with moving parts.
The heads on old drives stuck to the platters when they cooled down. Happened to us, machine on for 2+ years when we spun it down for 12 hours it would never come up again. Extract harddrive, drop it and the heads 'break loose' then the whole thing works again.
The bearings are seized. Dropping the drive may shift it enough to start turning once it is up to speed then it will work again.
In all cases the 'get new harddrive' is excellent advice.
While a large office was being constructed, a steel beam fell on a laptop that contained the plans for the building.
Now, THAT's what I call self-destruction!
My replacement Deathstar from computeralliance stopped working. I used it for a paperweight for several months. My flatmate had a need for some storage space and knew of the freezing trick. 24 hours later it worked! It's currently up and running in my connection box :)
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
There are only three people in the world who know the Coca Cola formula. They're not allowed to flight at the same time, nor be closer than N miles from each other.
Now If only the people at the WTC used this elemental backup method.
You would think warning people against ways of losing their data is against the interests of a company that recovers data...
Creates, deletes, or lists a volume mount point.
/D /L
/D Removes the volume mount point from the specified directory. /L Lists the mounted volume name for the specified directory.
MOUNTVOL [drive:]path VolumeName
MOUNTVOL [drive:]path
MOUNTVOL [drive:]path
path Specifies the existing NTFS directory where the mount
point will reside.
VolumeName Specifies the volume name that is the target of the mount
point.
The latest Slashdot meme.
Someone had indispensable data on a disk that wouldn't spin up and CRACKED THE CASE to rotate the pack by hand.
The disk survived for a couple of hours, long enough to copy the data before dust destroyed it forever.
I rarely delete stuff - I may uninstall apps, but I rarely delete data. The fewer times you delete, the fewer times you'd delete the wrong thing.
If you have to, put the ephemeral/temporary/test stuff in a separate place and never mix the permanent stuff with the temporary.
Hard drives are cheap. So if you run out of space, get a new bigger one.
OK so I'm a bit "pack rat"-ish. But hey a 200GB drive takes up the same amount of space as a 40GB one, and only costs 2X more.
In my experience HDDs aren't that reliable esp the 7200rpm ATA ones- I've had many with bad sectors. And when a drive dies unexpectedly I do lose data since the last backup. The fact that most HDD manufacturers switched to 1 year warranties for ranges of their drives some time back should have been a signal to people to start backing up a lot more regularly...
When I can't get to my data, I hop all over
the place and make stupid noises, until someone
comes along and turns the computer on....
Is there any software for Windows that would track changes in files of given folders and automatically backup previous versions of the files? I know that Google Desktop Search can do this, but I would fancy this tool to be more configurable. At least it should allow you to define the folders that are to be watched..
-- I'm was a sorry bastard with no friends, but now I've got Gmail! leet!
i.e. solder joints that have a crack in them. as they heat up in use, the joint expands, and the crack breaks electrical flow. cool it down, and it contracts and makes electrical contact. this is why tv engineers often have aerosols of freeze spray - you spray it on to suspect dry joints and see if it fixes the problem.
I made a living working on old HP disk drives (big ones...you know, with platters about 14" in diameter) for several years. When we finally switched IBM HDDs, I came across one that wasn't working, and mentioned it to my boss. He told me to slam it on the desk!?!...I thought he was nuts, but it worked, and as it turned out that was a common fix for those drives. Mind you that was ten years ago, so I've no idea if this problem still occurs with other drive types...I don't do hardware anymore (software geek).
Just another day in Paradise