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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."
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.
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!
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).
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. "
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!
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).
Always mount a scratch monkey.
I like music
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..
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)
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!
he did say he didn't lose anything BIG...
..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.
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.
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.
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
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 ?
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).
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
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.
Actually, I disagree. We've got almost 2000 Unix servers in our environment. The oldest 10% of them give us maybe 50% of our problems. In the case of a sparcstation 10, it has gone well past end of life, end of service life, and is into the "You're joking, right" phase of support from the vendor. So when something like this dies, someone on my team has to spend a day or two doing heroics to compensate for something that shouldn't have been in the data center in the first place. I should know we. We just replaced an old monstrosity with 4 CPUs and dedicated external storage with a bare bones PE1950 and internal 250 GB SATA RAID1.
Not because the new box was faster or more reliable. But simply to save on electricity.
In addition to heat and power savings (same thing, really), another consideration is licensing cost. If you're running an app that is priced by CPU, then keeping that old 16 CPU Sun E4500, at 350MHz, is a pretty expensive cost savings. The license savings alone can pay for the hardware upgrade, because of processor improvements. I had a project a couple of years ago to "migrate" a business that we had acquired into our infrastructure. E3500s and similar stuff, really old big heavy servers, half a country away. Turned out to be considerably cheaper to scrap those and buy new here, mostly financed by license savings due to fewer processors.
Sometimes, saving money by keeping the old stuff around is _very_ expensive.
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.