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Unusual Data Disaster Horror Stories
Lucas123 writes "Computerworld has posted stories from a disaster recovery company that include a scientist who drilled into his hard drive in order to pour oil into the mechanism to stop the squeaking. It worked. Of course a dead drive makes no noise. And, then a guy in Thailand who, after discovering ants in his external hard drive, took the cover off in order to spray the interior with insect repellent. Both the ants and the drive died."
Once, I thought I lost all the data in ~, /4 HOURS/ after I had gone out and purchased an external trive to back up to!!! Then it turned out I had only lost files up to part of 'k'; and then KDE didn't work properly. But I didn't lose anything big.
"There. Fixed it for you."
à_à
Let's hope that Scientist doesn't do research on computers. Otherwise I'd say you wouldn't want him or her. ;)
If at first you don't succeed
skydiving is not for you.
A Human Right
This doesn't quite fit in to the category of data disaster, because no data was lost.. ..once as I was going to bed my cat was chasing something on the floor of my room, where the old 386 desktop was sitting, with no drive bay covers over its empty bays. Eventually the cat stopped, and I figured he caught his pray. Of course he didn't; the next day I discovered it was a gopher, and it had lodged itself in between the old Reset and Turbo button panel and the motherboard.. and struggled.. and bled to death.. all over my running 386 SX 40 motherboard.
I didn't discover what was wrong until I woke up the next morning and began troubleshooting my mysteriously powered-down system.. the largest lifeform that my computer had ever consumed.
"'Yrch!' said Legolas, falling into his own tongue."
Seriously. It is by far the most hilarious profession you can get into. No matter what, from computers to cars to plumbing.
People are not necessarily stupid. From their point of view, what they did makes a lot of sense. You, as someone who knows more about the subject, can only shake your head in disbelieve. That starts with the examples mentioned here and ends with the guy who heard about some oil based liquid cooling, which caused him to have the smart idea to fill his computer with hot Crisco.
There is literally no limit to the human inventiveness when it comes to breaking stuff.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm sure the bulk of the people reading this have far better stories. I don't understand the parachute one though, do video camera's have built-in memory?
As for the memory stick one, my dear old 512MB Sandisk USB memory stick has been through the wash twice and survived fine. I've heard other people say the same thing. Anyone else have this happen to them? Anyone have a bigger storage medium go through the wash?
This space for rent
...a return to the days when computer bugs were really bugs...
...now if we could just get back to the days when the people using the computer helped design the thing and knew better than to douse it in any kind of liquid...
I'm waiting for a "-1 somepeoplejustshouldn'tgetmodprivileges" meta-moderation.
Does anybody happen to know how I might go about recovering data from a similarly damaged disk? I'm not sure if maybe there are companies that, say, perform such services for a fee. That would be hugely beneficial to the computing community as a whole.
If there are companies that recover data, how come we never hear about them in Slashdot articles? It would seem relevant to this audience.
"There is literally no limit to the human inventiveness when it comes to breaking stuff."
Try breaking reality.
Try studying quantum mechanics.
2004.
2005.
Top 10 Ways To Lose Your Data due to the human factor.
How to smash a home computer.
I wonder if that Thailand guy should had used RAID setup, and not Raid on his HDD. [grin]
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Here is the list at the originator's site: http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/data-disasters-2007/?news=120407
FairTax baby!
here
I forgot 2006!
:)
Also, here is Ontrack's official 2007 list.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I recovered some data from a laptop disk from a machine that had been dowsed in beer (yes, I am Australian) and had a small dead ant poking out of one of the breathing holes. It had a few problems but fortunately it could still spin up after it dried out.
drilled into his hard drive in order to pour oil into the mechanism to stop the squeaking.
Tssk, everyone knows one should just ignore the sq
Table-ized A.I.
Someone may have posted it but I've been referring to this site every six months or so to check on updates since my highschool years back in the late 90's. It is a list of "computer stupidities", some of which are actually pretty funny.
http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/
Note to self:
1) Do not place hard drive within 10 feet of 5 tesla muon detector.
2) Do not use fiber optic cable labeled "Insulation approved by Mouse Gourmets."
3) You don't know what overclocking is until you have a source of liquid helium.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Give it a go. Put the faulty drive into a freezer and leave it there for a while (several hours to a couple of days, it doesn't really matter).
Pull it out and reconnect it to a system. You then have a reasonable chance of imaging it with something like Acronis True Image before the drive thaws and dies again.
I've used this trick at least a half-dozen times and only once has it not helped...unless you can see a smouldering crater in the controller board (or the disk itself!), it's worth trying.
I have to ask...
#26369 +(3294)
[Blitz] Start=}Run, type in "command", then type deltree
[J0E] ok 1 sec, this better not fuck up my pc
[Blitz] it wont
[J0E] omfg, its deleting!
[Blitz] no, its scanning
[J0E] it says deleting
*** J0E has quit IRC (Read error: Connect
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
This website keeps a comprehensive list of tech support horror stories. I come back to this site every couple of months when I need a good laugh.
My favorite Data disaster horror story is 6x08 - A Fistful of Datas.
I see your comment tagged as Funny, so maybe I'm missing the sarcasm...
I usually try with a Linux bootcd first, making appropriate image backups. If that ever fails, I'll send it to a data recovery center.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
... when I put my shirt into washing machine. Actually, nothing interesting happens. No data loss and the stick works today (the washing happens about 1 year ago).
at tech camp where I stuck a drive up my... well you know the rest.. 7200 RPMs is fine but those 10000RPMs are dangerous!
"Wer in ur hard drives, stealin ur datas"
Bugs in the computer: Sun Microsystems, Inc. knows why Brazil is known to its native inhabitants as the kingdom of the ants.
Ants in yer... Pants? NOT! (Toshiba notebook/laptop); Ants Invade Apple iBook.
Ants In My Nokia (A Yahoo! account is required) 5210 Mobile Phone.
Ants in Omniview switchboxes: An e-mail story of ants invading a network switchbox.
Argentine ants invade a network hub.
A photograph showing ants nesting in a guy's phone box, affecting his DSL connection and phone system.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Discovering ants had taken up residence in his external hard drive, a photographer in Thailand took the cover off his computer and sprayed the interior with insect repellent.
He took the cover off his computer to control an infestation in his external hard drive? No wonder he stuffed up
As long as we are advertising disk recovery companies, may I say that Microsoft's ScanDisk is wonderful. \sarcasm
Always mount a scratch monkey.
I like music
He had a habit of spraying around the house. He finally found my CRT monitor (back in the day) and pissed all over the side. The repair guy said he's lucky it was turned off since cat pee is conductive at those voltages. I guess that was one life of his, 8 left.
TFA reads like a press release for Kroll. The whole thing is (almost) written like a short superhero story, with several paragraphs about Kroll saving the day in a small variety of mishaps which are neither very original nor particularly amusing.
These aren't disasters; all of these folks got their data back.
If this is the going rate for disaster articles these days, I might as well tell you all about the hard drive I recently rescued out of a Dell laptop after the Geek Squad had given up on it (big surprise, that). The Toshiba drive had either very bad spindle bearings or a failed head stack (or both), as when I powered it up it vibrated like crazy and made a very rapid thumping noise, but none of this was a big surprise given that it was a little over four years old.
In experimenting with it, I found a few interesting features:
Plugging it into a Windows box to try running Acronis against it immediately bluescreened the host machine.
When powered up, if the drive was slowly rotated, the nature of the thump would change, and something inside would emanate a horrible metal-on-metal grinding sound for as long as I kept rotating it (apparently due to the gyroscopic effect of the spinning platters along with the failed bearings).
The drive was totally unusable in its normal (label-side up) orientation; Linux wouldn't even read the partition table in that state.
But if I carefully propped the drive up, in a very particular, almost-vertical position resting on its connector, it worked. Not only that, but dd was able to recover every single sector of the disk, without error. I then dd'd that back to a new disk, reinstalled Windows (the theory is that Best Buy's fine Geek Squad managed to fuck up XP somehow) on it, did some shuffling of partitions in Acronis, and gave the customer back a working computer complete with their family photos and music library.
Total recovery of user data, much rejoicing, !=disaster.
Or, there was the 200GB Seagate desktop drive that was under six feet of water for about 48 hours. It worked just bloody fine after letting it dry for a week, and then removing the cover to dry out the innards a bit more. Despite the visible traces of river silt still laying on the platters, Windows Explorer was more than capable of retrieving all of the requested data.
Total recovery of user data, much rejoicing, !=disaster.
On the other hand, another (different model) Seagate drive which was also in the same flood failed miserably. Swapping controller boards did not help. Kroll's pricing for recovery was deemed too expensive, and it was therefore a total loss.
It was the hard drive from one of my boss's machines. Years worth of quotations and customer data that were stored in Outlook which he had been accustomed to referring to, all gone. This, of course, ==disaster. (But it was a minor disaster compared to the rest of the flood, which destroyed his office building, trashed the basement at his house, and ate enough of my own house that it is now condemned.)
He is still insistent on maintaining his own PCs, and has subsequently been given the standard-issue lecture about backups, which he'd already heard in the past. We'll see if it soaked in, this time.
But I seem to be digressing a lot, here. The point is, in a world stuffed full of stupid and funny computer stories, TFA doesn't seem to include any. The absence of both well-written humor and real disasters factored with the total lack of technical details equates to this article being positively inane and simply as useless as common whitewash. (Another example of this same PR tactic, not surprisingly from Kroll'
Kid-proof tablet..
I didn't know that removing bugs could damage a system like that...
Is this that kinda science where stuff breaks itself, or it doesn't, and you won't know 'til you disassembled it completely and take a look, just to find out you could've done without because everything's fine, at least in the area you disassembled, but it still doesn't work?
In that case, anything dealing with anything remotely mechanic is quantum mechanics.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
When I was about 10 or maybe 11 a mouse got into my Apple IIe floppy disk drive and left it's droppings. This somehow caused the drive to corrupt every floppy disk I put in the drive, even if it had a write protect tab (back in the day when the tabs were literally sticky things and floppy disks were literally floppy but I digress). Unfortunately I didn't work this out before I'd put in all copies of the code for a game I was writing in Apple Basic. (It was a combination of a sub vs ship game and ship vs ufo. I'd just gotten sprites moving on a screen. Very primitive and very badly coded but hey I was a kid and I was doing this with no help). That loss of that data put me off spending time writing code for a few years.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I'd say people have displayed impressive inventiveness in order to do that. The lengths people will go to to get high are just staggering. Liking toads comes to mind.
sudo ergo sum
In the days of 5.25inch floppies a colleague spilt coffee all over one. He drunk his coffee sweet, so the disk was a sticky mess. We all watched incredulously as he cut open the disk, removed the circular media and went and washed it under the tap. He then cut open a brand new 5.25 inch disk, removed the media and placed the washed media in the sleeve, sealing it with selotape. We all laughed at his stupidity as he put this disk into his computer drive .... until it worked perfectly and he recovered all the files.
I once accidentally pressed "power off" instead of "save" on a dedicated wordprocessor terminal on which I'd just written my term paper in a single draft during the morning it was due, the last class of the semester.
What makes this disaster unusual is that it actually happened. No, the prof didn't believe it either.
--
make install -not war
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
... and it was like, a really good paper!
I used to work with a company that managed calling card platforms. There was a large database that handled call routing and least cost routing. Obviously a critical set of data for the platform to function.
Standard practise was all live environments came up in a red terminal window and test environments in green.
One of our engineers was red/green colour blind.
It took nearly 45 minutes to get the platform back online after he purged a few countries worth of call routing tables from the database. Needless to say 45 minutes of outage was not a good thing in many respects. Believe me its not cool watching a whole bank of LED's on racks of voice gateways going from green to red en-mass.
Standard practise became, never have live and test open at the same time.
..actually, although I'll likely never buy from then again given their recent patent trolling, I must say that sandisk makes some quality memory. I once accidentally put a 2gb sandisk mini-'cruzer' through not just a wash cycle, but also in the dryer on high heat.. And it didn't even remain in the pocket it had been left in, but instead slipped out and was banging against the dryer drum the whole time (I heard the noise, and at the time merely thought I had left some loose change in one of my pockets, so didn't bother to stop it)..
..and, long story short, it still worked perfectly!
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
Flash memory is nearly indestructible. People have tried.
Though that raises a question: does the human get the award, or the data? Perhaps in these cases the human is just the means by which the data offs itself, like being the soda machine that crushes to death the cheap, stupid, thirsty guy. We don't give the award to the soda machine (well, at least not the Darwin Award :-) ).
Maybe there's just some sets of 1's and 0's that can't take being Microsoft code anymore. I could understand that.
"I'm Microsoft Bob. For the love of God, please kill me."
These both happened near the same time and almost cost me tons of data:
1. Lost one of my 200 GB drives in my RAID0 (or as I like to call it AID) array. Nothing like trying to scrape off the data before the catastrophic failure of the disk. Luckily the loss was minimized.
2. My 60 GB laptop HDD failed during the same time period. I think I managed to get some of the data off before the drive went dead, but its not like I had many places to put it.
I know they are both pretty mundane, since they were both random drive failures. Since then, I install separate OS disks and data disks. This way failure of one doesn't been the death of the other, and I still have a place to restore data too before those awful noises stops with the death of my drive.
I find it interesting the woman who "washed away" her data. My generic (MicroCenter bulk) USB flash drive has gone through the washer three times and the dryer twice. Not lost any data, and I am actually using it now.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
It happened 12 years ago or so. A co-worker asked me if he could use my computer to format a floppy disk because he was having problems with his. I said "yeah, sure."
He sat down, inserted the disk and typed "format c:". The rest is history.
. . . because I would have KILLED it if pissed in my CRT.
A number of IT horror stories have followed me through my career (in IT)..
from the time on my last day (at my first job) I dropped a £12,000 radar display, to a member of my team destroying a dozen servers because they tried to do what they had seen me do a month before... (oh - and formating my F instead of my G drive 2 days before my accounts were due...) but most recently, when I left my laptop out in the rain for three days....
Got home friday evening, put my laptop bag on the shed while I got something out the back of my car... I wasnt at work Monday so it was Tuesday before I went looking for it... accused my wife of hiding it, the dog of eating it, my kid of selling it... went to work figuring I must have left it there... but I hadnt...
My wife found it.. she pulled it out of the bag thinking maybe it had been protected (ha!) ; she tipped it to one side and water poured out...
When I got in I had calmed down. Id been through the "how could I have been so stupid?" phase and was now ready for battle
I downloaded the maintenance whitepapers from the website and stripped the thing all the way down ; motherboard out, the whole shebang. And I left it for a day at room temperature.
The next day I connected the disk drive to my home pc via usb.. and there it was - everything. no complaints, no dataloss
did a total backup, then put laptop back together - and it was fine! I was expecting something but no ; it was A-OK
All I can say about data loss is dont lose hope ; where there is a will there's a way - where where is determination there is a solution
My friend's dad got fed up with pulling his tower case out from under his desk so decided to fit some caster wheels to it.
He unplugged the PC and turned it upside down then drilled four small holes in each corner for the self tapping screws.
You can see what's coming can't you?
When he turned it the right way up and plugged it back in everything was fine. Now anybody with half a brain will know that small spiral bits of steel swarf don't mix with sesitive electronics. Unfortunatley, the bang he got when he pressed the power button was unexpected and he hit his head on the underside of the desk.
After he got out of casualty, where he'd had a few stitches put in his tongue, he called me to ask what he could do to fix his PC. After I'd stopped laughing my head off I just said "PC World".
Oh dear.
I drink, therefor I am... drunk.
Ha. My brother-in-law called me a week or so ago with a dead drive, I told him to freeze it. He was skeptical but he gave it a go; he managed to rescue his girlfriend's stuff from the thing and couldn't thank me enough.
Good old Chiller Theater from good old DECUS. I will always remember the one about the hospital with medical waste pipes running through its basement computer room. Yep, busted.
Property is theft.
No names. A "scientist drilled a hole through the casing and poured oil into the mechanics" ? Give me a break. These stories are so vague and fake it's stupid. What hard drive squeaks in the first place? Cases have screws, you don't need to drill to get them apart. Fake.
Even the original article is essentially just an advertisement for OnTrak. WTF? Why is slashdot inserting ad content into the story sections now? Keep that shit in the banner ads.
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
I was on a construction site, and we had just gotten computers. After a while, one started acting funny, and we called corporate IT, who sent a tech. When he opened the case, he found:
1) a 1/4" layer of red dust, compliments of the dry conditions during sitework, and
2) a health layer of "chocolate jimmies" scatered through the case.
After that, we opened up all of them, and found the same thing. Then we opened up the dot matrix printers - not only was their a layer of dust and mouse crap, but the mice had decided to "sample" the foam sound insulation. They took a bite and then spit it out - about a thousand times.
For all the abuse, the IBM pc's and laptops, Okidata dot matrixes (matrices?), and HP 5&6 laser printers barely missed a beat.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
We could tell who owned it because we recognized all the people in all the photos which were perfectly readable. On getting it back, the owner remembered losing it months before and thought it was gone forever.
Long ago, in a previous life, I volunteered to judge the Computer Science section at the Detroit science fair. One 16 year old kid's display consisted only of a hard drive. He said his computer had gotten a virus and his project was the effort to get rid of it. He began by taking the hard drive apart... but didn't find anything. He said it didn't work when he put it back together.
We didn't award him any ribbons.
So my car was legally parked in front of my girlfriend's house, on a 30mph street. There is a gradual turn, and if you're not paying attention, you'll miss the turn and hit my car.
... I noticed as she reversed that the right half of her front axle is torn off, wheel still lodged in my car. She didn't get far obviously (lots of horrible scraping), and eventually got out after I knocked on her window. After surveying the damage together, she informs me (completely straight-faced) "I'm late for work, really sorry ... can you help me put my wheel back on?"
... but she said "OH MY GOD, THANK YOU!"
Well, that's basically what happened. Some nut not paying attention drove right into my car around 40mph. Needless to say, my car's left side didn't survive. I was in the house when I heard it, looked out the window, and saw this car impaling my own.
So I go out to investigate, and the woman is attempting to drive away
The rage I felt was unimaginable. But I calmly said, "Sure, how about I go into the house and get some super glue and we'll fix that right up for you."
It was either the shock of the accident or she was just that stupid
But I'm a cruel heartless bastard, even more so when someone doesn't get the sarcasm. "On second thought, we're waiting for a tow truck, and the cops."
And no, she wasn't drunk (the cop was honestly surprised).
OK, I figured something : ants do ot go back where they die, so he only needs a replacement drive in the same enclosure :)
:) LOL
I figured this when I had a serious ant problem in my office. Living on the tropics we have these things we call sugar ants. Tiny hyper fast ants, that appear on anything and everything with half a calorie in it.
Now one day I put my Sony MDR-whatever DJ headphones on in the office, to come to a realization that I was ithching like hell. Itching and tickling. That was because ants were escaping from both my headsets. Over the weekend they built a damn nest inside, and when I shook them up they were transporting eggs and who knows what out of the nest in a hurry.
Being a vegetarian treehugger I usually do not kill anything. Unless it attacks me. So there went the headset into the fridge.
Cold slows ants down. Then they can shake them off. It works. After cooling them I opened the set and got the nest out, and threw it in the garden (ants actually seem to de-hibernate/defrost and come back to life, though probably there was collateral).
To cut the story short: from that point I was really careful with my headphones, and inspected them before putting them on. But they never returned. There was a similar incident in a CD case. Then again the ants never ever returned.
I only used cooling, then getting the ants out, never any chemicals (I do not use chemicals when possible, I am simply scared of them. I better eat 200000 instances of bacteria then breathe in one sip of chemical fume, be it desinfectant, window cleaning liquid, or bug killer spray.
Oiling the disk is the stupidest thing I have ever heard of
Had some data on an ancient Seagate SCSI drive that died. Had to get it back. Bought same model of drive off Ebay, after fighting with several other nitwits trying to bid on same models, yeesh. Pulled the drives apart and swapped the controller board first, no luck. Noticed a read/write head was GONE on one of the ELEVEN head arms. Pulled the head mechanism out of the fleabay drive. Had to use a plastic comb to keep the heads separated. Put the head assembly into the old drive and, voila, total access to the drive. The hardest part was trimming the damned comb so the heads were far enough apart to spread over the platter but not so far as to not fit between the platters. Ruined about 6 of them. Finally found one for children, only to hear the wife bitch about trashing it, seems it was a childhood heirloom-wannabee thing.
Too much ad, too little story:(
If you ever lived in Thailand, you would probably not only put bug spray into that machine, but literally take it outside and douse it in gasoline before hosing it with a propane fire wand to get rid of the ants and quite possibly any new 'nest' site. Those ants in Thailand bite on the one end and verrrry painfully sting on the other end; and they do not stop stinging as long as you move or live, whichever ceases first. Let the Thai posters on this site set the record even straighter. Southeastern Asian ants are MEAN, and they have a bad ATTITUDE, and they will bite and sting en masse. Critters like this are one reason that many Asian households have pet ferret cousins, the mongoose, for pets. They will warn you if a million ants cross your front door, and they will find the king cobra hiding in your closet....and the killer scorpion in your shoes, keeping warm until food (your hand) arrives. As long as they survive to tell you or present you with the dead cobra, green krait, taipan or whatever. Many households have more than one mongoose.
And if you don't have Acronis True Image, try Partimage Is Not Ghost.
I was working tech support a couple of years ago for a major university. One of our duties was being "available" if someone came to customer service to try to recover data off removable media. It was a free service on a best-effort basis.
One day, I had a lady come in in tears that she "couldn't open her dissertation" off her floppy disk. I asked her if she had another copy on her computer at home, to which she said no. I used every disk utility we had and none would read it. I tried Windows, Linux, nothing. As a last ditch effort, I put it in a old G4 Macintosh with one of those Imation SuperDrives (Floppy + Zip Like disks), (OS 9.0.2 or something like that) at the suggestion of one of the other techs and it actually worked. It loaded the whole filesystem, and we recovered the document.
The corrupted document fortunately didn't have any graphs/graphics or COM objects, so opening it in a programmer's text editor we were able to pull out all the text so all she had to do was reformat it.
I wish that was the only time I had to recover lost thesis or disertation from graduate students who should have known better.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
I recently (and accidentally) put my USB thumb drive in the washing machine.
I don't recommend it, but mine is still working fine, haha.
As I recall, toad-licking involves squeezing a certain part of the toad to express some mucosal goop which contains the active ingredient, then licking the goop off of the toad. I don't know for sure, I've never tried it. Probably never will, either. I like to think that I have better things to do than licking amphibians.
If you need to extend the time required, then try:
Rubberband the drive between two Polar Packs® before placing into the freezer. These packs are used in shipping perishable goods (my uncle is diabetic, and these are used for the insulin, but an order placed with Omaha Steaks will get you something like them). Thawed, they will feel like Jello®, and will mold themselves to the shape of the drive. Be sure to have the connectors sticking out, or you'll have to do all this over again. Once the whole thing is frozen, you'll have an extra running time of about an hour or so.
The only drawback is condensation, but if you keep the bags clean, the condensate should be mineral-free, and not cause a problem.
Sounds like an Instructable is in the works...
Long back I had one of those electronic chessboards, the kind that you can press down on to let the built in computer know the moves and play against you. One day it just stopped working so I tried changing the batteries and even the tool of the unenlightened, the dust buster but still nothing. So I open it up and something falls out....it was a cockroach that just fell out and then it became clear what happened when I saw the leg soldered to the circuit board with burn marks around it...
Are you trolling, or just clueless? Probably both.
If a drive is already fucked (ie, won't boot, data apparently unrecoverable, etc) then how is this last-ditch rescue attempt "destroying" something when it is already effectively destroyed?
A lot of folk will toss out a hard drive the moment it stops working (new drives are cheap) and bemoan the lost data, when a very small amount of effort could well have recovered it.
Apparently the data wasn't worth their time backing up then it's not worth devoting a lot of time and effort to recovering it: the freezer method is not time-consuming (freeze, connect, image), so why not try?
Stick to your Xbox, sonny and leave computers to the grown-ups.
In the early days of 3.5" floppies being common, my floppy broke one more step...
I had spent a couple weeks on a programming project - basically a lame, wildly feature-incomplete clone of lynx in assembly. I had a backup of the couple weeks of programming... but not the last 36 solid hours or so of last minute push. And then the disk stopped working.
So suspecting a filesystem corruption, I brought it to a couple ubergeeks, one of them ran a raw sector read on it... there was just nothing there, no filesystem, no sectors. I was actually in the Mechanical Engineering department, so around then it occurred to us to LOOK at the disk - when you spun the little metal part, the little media part DIDN'T spin; they had become detached.
So... I took a toothpick. And some superglue. And I glued the media back to the metal. A few seconds and another raw sector read later, I had 100% of my code... in the wrong order. Actually I had about 160% of my code... there were a ton of repeated sections.
But I could figure that out well enough; day was saved for me.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
Your tale (tail, get it? sorry...) reminded me of the first BASIC program I tried to run on a TRS-80 CoCo, or some such. I spent who knows how long typing it in - never really having typed anything, at that tender age - and then just sat and watched it do nothing. And do nothing. And a bit more of nothing. Until I got tired of waiting and turned off the machine - tossing all of the typing I'd done. Then, just after I turned it back on - naturally... - I noticed where the manual said, "Now type 'run' and press 'enter' to execute the program."
Eh. You live, you learn...
Truth, Justice. Or the American Way.
I'm surprised the USB drive failed in a washing machine cycle. I'm sure it can happen. But, once I dropped my smartphone into a salt-water bay. It lay at the bottom for at least a month before it could be recovered. When I got it back the phone was pretty corroded. I took out the memory card which was also wet. The gold contacts had not corroded. Popped it in my memory card reader and it worked perfectly. I recovered all the data with no problem.
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