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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."
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."
...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.
Q: What's the difference between intelligence and stupidity?
A: There's a limit to intelligence.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
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.
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.
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. "
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.
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!
at tech camp where I stuck a drive up my... well you know the rest.. 7200 RPMs is fine but those 10000RPMs are dangerous!
Or go into medicine. You wouldn't belive the things people put in their rectum and how it got there...
"Wer in ur hard drives, stealin ur datas"
Always mount a scratch monkey.
I like music
Thank goodness the porn folder starts with "p"
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
But ... but I fell on it. Honestly. I didn't look and sat down and whoops, in went the hamster.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
... 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.
he did say he didn't lose anything BIG...
True. And in -any- business. My brother is a car-mechanic. True anecdote follows:
Lady on the phone: "Could you please send a mechanic to fix my car ? I can't come to the garage, because the problem is, a wheel fell off".
Brother: "We could do that, where do you live ?"
Lady: "At so-and-so, oh and could the mechanic please stop in the crossing of X and Y, pick up the wheel and bring it along, that's where it fell off."
Brother: "So, that's where we'll find the vehicle too then ?"
Lady: "Oh no, I noticed the wheel falling off, and the car made a horrible scraping sound, but I was in a hurry, so I drove it home on 3 wheels."
End-effect: A 10-minute re-attachment of a wheel turned into the need to completely replace the disc-brake on one wheel, and readjust suspension. $1500, for what would otherwise have been like $100 (she could've put the wheel back on herself really, if she had half a clue)
Probably into midgets or something...
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Stop looking through my windows!!
They didn't happen to have the story about a moose biting my sister's hard drive did they? Moose bites can be pretty nasty....
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.
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).
I had a flat tire right next to the local mental hospital. As I was replacing the tire this mental resident walked over to the fence and watched me. I dropped the spare and it flipped the hubcap full of wheel nuts into the ditch. I couldn't find any of the nuts in the grass. Not knowing what to do I kicked the sh!t out of things and was jumping around when I heard this low voice say just take one nut off of the other three wheels and use them to hold the tire on. Shocked I turned around to see the mental patient looking at me. I said good idea but why are you on the other side of the fence? He said Because I'm Fuc*ing crazy not stupid you idiot!
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.
A friend once told me a story about when he was a cable installer/technician. He got called to some old lady's house who was having problems with her signal - she wasn't getting any channels.
He got there and fiddled with the tv and box for awhile and started looking at the cabling. Eventually he found a piece of exposed cable along the wall. It had been cut, cleanly, with the two ends sitting about a foot apart.
He pointed this out to the lady, who said she had to move the TV a bit so cut the cable. Her explanation: she figured since the signal could get all the way from the big antennas in the city to her TV, she didn't see a mere foot of separation in the cable should cause any problems.
True story.
"How" is always the same: "I slipped while stepping out of the shower".
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
No matter how intuitive it seems, Macs don't need regular lubrication with apple juice.
;)
Just sayin'
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.