Hard drive failure

[ric777]

Ok, so after telling all who I do upgrades etc for to make sure they backup their data, I have been caught big time with my pants down. Unfortunately I've gotten a bit coc*y thinking that a hard drive with a 3 year warranty would give me at least a couple of years and so some of my data was not backed up. This bloody thing is barely a year old and has totally **cked up.

Was doing some graphics work on some pictures when the comp. suddenly rebooted and it kept rebooting once it reached the Windows XP screen every time and even when trying in safe mode. Did an Fdisk and it showed -273MB, that's absurd. Never seen anything like it.

Have hooked it up as a slave and also thru' a usb caddy but can not even see the device, which should be drive "G", in this case.

Looking for someone who is able to retrieve data off a dead drive, if that's possible and who is not going to charge the earth and also the moon.

Things I need are Bizz Wizz backup files (yes I did back them up but recently only on that drive.)

Some photo's of my daughters little bloke

Sh!t loads of songs recently downloaded

Photos of the Beddy van which I had spent heaps of hours editing trying to come up with a graphics scheme for the paint job that's coming up.

Favourites, including Skyline related sites.

And some DWG (Autocad) files, although they aren't that important.

I doubt that Western Digital would be bothered with doing that even tho' their stupid hard drive failed so early.

Any suggestions appreciated.

[Guerilla]

Ok, so after telling all who I do upgrades etc for to make sure they backup their data, I have been caught big time with my pants down. Unfortunately I've gotten a bit coc*y thinking that a hard drive with a 3 year warranty would give me at least a couple of years and so some of my data was not backed up. This bloody thing is barely a year old and has totally **cked up.

Was doing some graphics work on some pictures when the comp. suddenly rebooted and it kept rebooting once it reached the Windows XP screen every time and even when trying in safe mode. Did an Fdisk and it showed -273MB, that's absurd. Never seen anything like it.

Have hooked it up as a slave and also thru' a usb caddy but can not even see the device, which should be drive "G", in this case.

Looking for someone who is able to retrieve data off a dead drive, if that's possible and who is not going to charge the earth and also the moon.

Things I need are Bizz Wizz backup files (yes I did back them up but recently only  on that drive.)  

Some photo's of my daughters little bloke

Sh!t loads of songs recently downloaded

Photos of the Beddy van which I had spent heaps of hours editing trying to come up with a graphics scheme for the paint job that's coming up.

Favourites, including Skyline related sites.

And some DWG (Autocad) files, although they aren't that important.

I doubt that Western Digital would be bothered with doing that even tho' their stupid hard drive failed so early.

Any suggestions appreciated.

WD? My fken WD failed too, not even a year old.

[G0DF4Th3R]

there's this guy on WA forums called Alpha.. i dunno if he could help but i think he owns a computer business could at least point u in the right direction

[ric777]

there's this guy on WA forums called Alpha.. i dunno if he could help but i think he owns a computer business could at least point u in the right direction

Thanx man, I'll look him up

[ric777]

WD? My fken WD failed too, not even a year old.

must have been a bad batch of them last year. going to set up a mirror raid this time aaaaand do my backups like I preach to others.

[Zahos]

WD? My fken WD failed too, not even a year old.

hahaha, same here, not even a year old, WD....

I still bought another WD though :confused:

[Duncan]

depends how keen you are to retreive it. I spent $450 with a mob called Forensic Data in Sydney, including a trip to the US to a lab to find it was 100% unretreivable. They claim about 70% success rate so I guess I must just be a statistic

My last full backup was 13 months before

[Guest Variable]

Try a program called GetDataBack (specific NTFS and Fat32 versions). I had a whole invisible partition on my laptop harddrive that I was able to recover.

Good Luck

pm me if you need more info.

[Neo_R34]

scary stuff! My WD caviar sh*t itself 2 months back as well...unretrievable data, but luckily all the important stuff was backed up. Now have gone to a Barracuda, after many many years being a WD fan...no more !

Best of luck getting the data....

Cheers,

Michael

[ric777]

Thanks for the input guys. Only ever had 1 low speed WD go down on someones pc a few years ago. Was a Quantum fan until they went feral for a while there and gave up on them.

Didn't have much luck with Seagate. Looks like WD are going thru' that phase atm.

Duncan.. that must of hurt

Robocop.. have found the website, will see if that might work

[ric777]

Well guys, miracles sometimes do happen. Went to Austins to get a MB for a pc I'm building and the guy I know there gives me this WD mini disk that has Data Life guard on it. He said that it may identify what the prob is with the HD.

Anyway, I run this cd and the bloody thing is in Japanese, so not much use to me, but gets me thinking that I should visit the WD site and it was downloadable. Anyway I make a bootable diag. floppy and hook up the dodgey hd and it scans it and says no errors with the hd.

So I boot from the hd and it does a chk disk by itself (which it hadn't done b/4) and makes me think that perhaps something may happen this time. But then it reboots and there's me thinking, "sh!t it's doing the same think as b/4" but lo and behold, it boots up fine. Yey F****** Yey.

So I quickly get my Bizz Wizz stuff off first and the other stuff in order of importance, just incase this hd goes silly again. Still got music to get off but that's going to take 2 cd's so if it happens, fine. If not, too bad.

So there we have it guys. It may work for some of you guys.

[JXL]

yeah theres no guarantee with HDDs nowaydays no matter what brand. I used to work in a computer wholesaler and we sold every type of HDDs - WD, IBM, Seagate, Fujitsu, Maxtor etc

Even the SCSI versions which are so much better i had DOAs everyday. 3 year warranty means bugger all in terms of build quality.

ric777 if you have this problem again and lucky you have a 2nd hdd that is master get a program call R-Studio Pro its the god of all these recovery programs.

example, i had a 80GB go no boot nothing only detect in bios (lucky)

R-STudio recovers even deleted/purged stuff (not formatted) I got back 120GB?!?! no shit outta an 80GB drive.

R-Studio I heard was onced used with the FBI for getting kiddy rapers.

[ric777]

thanx jxl, will keep that in mind. There's always someone who has had their drive die on them and wanting to retrieve data. Could even make $$ out of it

[JXL]

yeah but the problem is they lose a 80GB hDD and you recover back 79GB of it and they are still all pissed off cause the 1GB that couldn't be recovered has everything they really wanted off it.

had to deal with that all the time at my old work and the amount of crap reasons that come out with them not wanting to pay for the service is a real piss off. computer jobs flat out suck unless your a deal with no-one network admin but hey if you can get a niche going then your set.

[ric777]

yeah but the problem is they lose a 80GB hDD and you recover back 79GB of it and they are still all pissed off cause the 1GB that couldn't be recovered has everything they really wanted off it.

had to deal with that all the time at my old work and the amount of crap reasons that come out with them not wanting to pay for the service is a real piss off. computer jobs flat out suck unless your a deal with no-one network admin but hey if you can get a niche going then your set.

Know where you're coming from.

don't know how many times I've spent hours on old machines that were really only good for boat anchors. 2 hours worth of labor was worth more than the stupid things. Unfortunately most of the time it happens to be PC's of friends.

Got to the stage now that I won't bother looking at anything that's too old. Just can't be bothered.

[JXL]

most of the time your buggering around with viruses or corrupted system files and you can easily dick around trying to get to the files they want for 4 hrs. then it usually comes down to a reinstall of everything they got. another 2 hrs at least there.

when you are charging a real cheap $50/hr (some charge $80 so if your paying $50 don't complain) 6 hrs work $300 - not many people are willing to pay that so your wasting time with the sole trader business.

but anyways good to hear you got it all back good stuff.

[ric777]

most of the time your buggering around with viruses or corrupted system files and you can easily dick around trying to get to the files they want for 4 hrs. then it usually comes down to a reinstall of everything they got. another 2 hrs at least there.

when you are charging a real cheap $50/hr (some charge $80 so if your paying $50 don't complain) 6 hrs work $300 - not many people are willing to pay that so your wasting time with the sole trader business.

but anyways good to hear you got it all back good stuff.

couldn't have said it better if I tried.

[AlphA]

Ohh the pain of broken Hard drives.. Who did you speak to at Austin computers? I worked for them for a few years untill I started up my own shop.

- Adam

[JXL]

alpha wondering if i ever dealt with you when i was at RTV Computers, basically next door to your east perth store at one point.

do you know marcel, ershad, roeland, tom or nick?

[ric777]

Ohh the pain of broken Hard drives.. Who did you speak to at Austin computers? I worked for them for a few years untill I started up my own shop.

- Adam

David Guildford, nice bloke but moved on now, got into security.

Can you match their prices or better. I'm on reseller list although haven't done much lately.

Ric