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Unusual Data Disaster Horror Stories

Posted by Zonk on from the lolcats-can-has-hard-drives dept.

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."

6 of 324 comments (clear)

  1. If you want a good laugh, go into repair by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:If you want a good laugh, go into repair by EMCEngineer · · Score: 3, Interesting

      For non-PC items, check out http://www.microwaves101.com/content/microwavemortuary.cfm

      It has mainly microwave devices, but it's nice to see some variety - like the snake.

  2. This is a fairly tame list by Scoldog · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

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    This space for rent
  3. Re:How to recover data from a damaged disk? by untaken_name · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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    http://xkcd.com/386/
  4. Flash memory in washing machine by sanermind · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ..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!

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    ---
    the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
  5. Ants - now he is safe by dindi · · Score: 3, Interesting

    OK, I figured something : ants do ot go back where they die, so he only needs a replacement drive in the same enclosure :)

    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 :) LOL