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."

Comments

Previous lists of stories.

[antdude]

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]

The list

[sporkme]

Here is the list at the originator's site: http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/data-disasters-2007/?news=120407

2006!

[antdude]

I forgot 2006!

Also, here is Ontrack's official 2007 list. :)

Re:How to recover data from a damaged disk?

[_xeno_]

I assume you're asking for the original press release from Ontrack Data Recovery. And, helpfully, not linked from either the Slashdot summary or the Computerworld article.

Re:Skydiving

[cheater512]

Gravity is 1G.

Hitting the ground at high speed is *not* 1G.

The ol' freezer trick works maybe 75% of the time

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

For anyone who loves these kinds of stories

[Romicron]

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.

Re:Ah the nostalgia...

[Antique Geekmeister]

Actually, for systems that were flushed with dirty water such as that from coffee spills ceiling leaks, washing with distilled water is very helpful for washing away the corroding residue from the dirty water. You have to apply some sense in what and how you clean it, but if you don't clean it, the boards are much more likely to fail as acidic residue eats into the various coatings and compoents.

Re:If you want a good laugh, go into repair

[nahdude812]

The most common cause of wheels on cars falling off is a side-effect of the parent of your post - people putting wheels on themselves and getting the lug nuts wrong. Lug nuts go on with the tapered side in. The taper keeps the lug nut centered to the bolt since there is a matching taper on the wheel hub. If you don't do this, the bolt shifts back and forth in the holes on the hub every time you accelerate and break. Eventually you weaken the shafts and they break off, tossing your wheel.

Why they don't make lug nuts with tapers on both sides I will never know, but I'm not a mechanic and I've actually seen it happen right in front of me two different times.

Re:Skydiving

[petermgreen]

OverlordQ got the equation he quoted right.

What he did not justify is how he went from a falling velocity of 125 meters per second to a deceleration of 6250 meters per second per second

Also his conversion from newtons to Gs is wrong 1G is 9.8 newtons so 3125 newtons is roughly 319G

The correct answer given a mass and a height is to say that you have not been given enough information to answer the question, to answer the question mathematically requires a lot of knowlage of the material properties of both the falling item and the surface being hit.

Re:Skydiving

[bunratty]

Except that the force that causes macroscopic objects to bump into each other instead of pass through each other is the electromagnetic force, not nuclear forces.