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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."
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
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).
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
This only works on drives which are failing from stiction (static friction).
This usually occurs when heat causes parts of the hard drive to expand and rub against one another. Freezing the drive can shrink them enough to allow you to get data off the drives. However, due to the large size of modern hard drives, it is possible that you will not have enough time to transfer the full contents of a drive before it heats up again. This used to work really well, and in the field, it was a crowd-pleaser.
http://xkcd.com/386/
I have heard horror stories of co-locations with gopher, rat and red ant problems. They seem to like chewing on the cables. Personally the only issue I know of was a when the computer rooms cooling system was malfunctioning and it took some real hardware debugging to fix it. Turned out to be a big wasp's nest clogging up the air duct.
..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.
Actually you are more likely to loose porn and other personal data without any available backups. Corporate data tends to be on some kind of backup schedule.
As for personal data disasters. There was a Dell Laptop model (can't remember which one) that has a short screw directly over the hard drives circuit board. I put in a slightly longer screw by mistake and killed the drive.
It took us 2 days to find the exact model on E-Bay then 2 minutes to swap the circuit boards. After which the data was transferd to an external drive. Then a brand new replacement drive was installed for regular use.
That Blunder cost around $150 and 5 days of downtime on a laptop but I (and all the other geeks in the office) learned a lot about being meticulous.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
It took us 2 days to find the exact model on E-Bay then 2 minutes to swap the circuit boards. After which the data was transferd to an external drive. Then a brand new replacement drive was installed for regular use.
That Blunder cost around $150 and 5 days of downtime on a laptop but I (and all the other geeks in the office) learned a lot about being meticulous.
I got to do something very similar to that about a year ago. One of the engineering departments here has their own webserver, running on a SparcStation 10. Think 1989, 1990, something like that. It was working great until the hard drive's circuit board caught fire. Well OK, caught fire might be a BIT of an overstatement but there were charred components on the board and smoke-trails inside the enclosure, so, close enough. I've done the drive-board-swap thing a few times in the past and it works if you get the right type of drive, but this was an oddball (4.5GB SCSI) drive type that we didn't have any others of in the building. So, I presented the options to the engineering manager. 1. It's dead, and boy don't you wish your people had listened to the backup team when they told you backups had failed long ago, 2. send the drive off to ontrack.com or whatever, assuming the platters are good and the data is intact, or 3. let me get creative.
So, as you say, eBay looking for "seagate st15xomething". Found one with a "buy it now", 1.5 hours away by car. 100 bucks or something. Annoying but cheaper than downtime for that particular group. I bought it, we sent one of his techs out to drive out and get it, and later in the day, swapped the board & up and running. Got it onto mirrored drives at least now but, they're still running on the old box. (shrug) OK, good luck with that, seeya next time.
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
Years ago, we experimented in the office to see just how much abuse one
:-)
of those 5.25 floppies could take. We took the disk out, put fingerprints
all over it, threw it on the floor and stomped on it with dirty shoes, wrote
on it with a marker, and were still able to read it.
Setting a hot coffee pot on it did the trick though
I've seen this happen before too. Opened up a case to install a new hd for a buddy of mine, and the entire bottom of the case, the top of the cd rom drive, the hard drives, floppy drives, pretty much everything was covered in mouse turds and big yellow/black urine stains. How the computer was still running was beyond me. I set the jumper on it and just explained how to hook it up. He hooked it up himself and didn't even bother cleaning up the mess (or to put out mouse traps for that matter) Computer ran just fine for several years after that. How the motherboard withstood it is beyond me.
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.