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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
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.
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.
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!
"Wer in ur hard drives, stealin ur datas"
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..
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.
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.
... 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.
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).
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