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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.
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?"
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.
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'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.
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.
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
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."
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.
What about the methods that involved a chicken at midnight?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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?
No, but I can state the obvious:
People are a lot more likely to go around telling about their hardware failing, than to tell about their own screw ups.
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
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.
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?
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
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 :)
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.