Computer Geeks... 6 months of baby pictures gone!
 

Most of you know I've been shopping for a HUGE external hardrive for work use: https://www.miataturbo.net/forum/t31294/

I was going to buy 2 of them and have one for home use. I was waiting for the tax return to buy them, and FUCKING TONIGHT, my 5yr old 60gb Firelite shit the bed. The blue led blinks once, pauses, then 6 times rapidly... and repeats. I can hear the thing spool up when I plug it in, and it makes a few attempts at boost (whatever), but then shuts off and blinks.

I've discovered that Firelite uses a somewhat standard 2.5" Samsung 5400rpm drive. I thought I might remove the drive and stick it in a new enclosure ($20 from anywhere) to see if it was the enclosure at fault... but most DATA RECOVERY places will charge you extra if you've tried to fix it yourself. The fact that I can hear it spin-die-spin-die-spin-die... and it makes a few very faint squeeking sounds while it's doing it, tells me it's probably not the enclosure.

So... it's about 30gb of pictures and video of the kid and I have to get it back... even if it's FOR THE LOVE OF SWEET BABY JESUS IN A TUXEDO SHIRT EXPENSIVE.

What do the geeks around here think I should do?

The data recovery places are going to hurt you bad if you have to use them.

I like your idea of swapping enclosures 1st.

Do you have other machines in the house?
I've gone to Microsoft Home Server (but there are other excellent and perhaps better products that do the same thing). All of the machines in my house are backed up every night by the home server software. I've had to recover a couple of times and it works like a charm.

When you do get it back, make a many copies of the images. Burn dvd's, copy it to multiple systems...

I think you answered this for yourself...

data recovery


Unless you know how to remove magnetic data from a malfunctioning hard drive, that is.

I have a western digital external USB 10gb drive, used it like 5 times and it did that shit to me. luckily i had nothing important on it.

I've heard the trick to it is to stick it in the freezer for a little, then take it out and run it. You can do this a couple times, but it will damage ur drive more. It may or may not give you enough time to get all the files off it. Anyone else know of this trick?

If it is a mechanical failure (like a spindle bearing) there's an old trick that sometimes works. Put the drive in a ziploc bag, and stick it the freezer overnight. Then pull it out and power it up, and immediately grab your data. This may only work long enough to get a few minutes of runtime out of it, so be prompt and head for the most important stuff first.

For certain, try putting it in another enclosure (or internal to a desktop machine) first, as that's much less invasive.

edit Artie beat me to it.

The freezer bag trick never worked for me and I have been working with computers for as long as I can remember.

I would recommend trying a different enclosure first.

I have always wondered how the data recovery places work, I bet they find an identical drive and swap platters.

Yeah, that's what they do. I used to work very closely with a company called AC Forensics and you could buy a donor drive and they would swap the platters and get your data.

Makes sense.

Id love to try a platter swap, but my hands havent gotten around to it.

From dismantling hundreds of hard drives, the hardest part of the whole thing I imagine would be the platter alignment.

I've done a platter swap on an old Seagate Hawk 2gig SCSI drive way back in the day. I didn't actually swap the platters, I swapped the electronics with out actually opening up the drive case.

One thing I've done to OLD hard drives is to give it a seriously hard whack on the side of the drive while it is spinning up. It has worked a number of times, however these were always much less data dense drives than a more current bit of hardware.

I know this doesn't help you now ... but for our family pictures I back up to two hard drives and then occasionally archive to DVD. Most of our stuff is in 4 places, the only thing that would fuck us up is a house fire or EMP.

^ This is something a lot of people dont get. A backup is not a single copy, its a second copy.

I have a 1.2 terabyte raid 5 array in my workstation at home, and a external 1 terabyte drive for partition images. Even though I know its damn near impossible to lose data off a raid 5, I am that ---- that I need to have it on a second, external, drive that I turn on once a month for backups.

Enclosure swap (or just put the damn thing in your computer!) first. If that doesn't work, try the freezer trick. I've done it 3 times, two of which worked for long enough to get the important data off of the drive.

Last ditch I've used these guys before.

Data Recovery by: I.T.S.

They've recovered data for me from drives that had severe damage, as well as some really unique and ancient drives.

RAID.

this thing is the bomb:

2-Bay Network Storage Enclosure - DNS-323 by D-Link

and I guess so's this:

D-Link DNS-321 2-Bay Network Storage Enclosure

If you are serious about data integrity these things are not the way to go.

By Sam's knowledge here i assume he's Russian.

Da

Well, at USB 2.0 speed, I don't think a couple minutes is gonna be enough to grab all of the pics on it... we're talking about 35gb total.

I know I have the skill to remove the 4 screws, take the drive out, and re-install it into a separate enclosure... but if I fuck something up or the dog grabs it out of my hand because it's shiny or something I can't even imagine happens... it's ALL of our baby pictures.

However, I can't fucking stomach paying somebody $500 for "data recovery" and discover all they had to do was a 5minute re-install into a $20 case.

Do I have to mail the thing off to some hi-dollar online place, or will any of the local Computer Dr.'s (or similar) be enough.

And I don't suppose there's any hurry on this... I'm ordering my 3 new drives tonight and the old broke one can literally sit on a shelf for the next 10 years until there's some Star Trek shit on the market and I can just beam the data off.

I think I'm gonna buy a 1tb for work, and 2x500's for home... and have all my home shit backed up 2 places, plus I'm getting a stack of DVD's and burning all my pics. DVD's are 8gb, right?

Sucks to hear man. Back that data up! Thats hwy my new machine will have 2x 640GB (one for backup storage), a 150GB 10k RPM drive for gaming, and a 1TB external SSD for backup of the backup. As cheap as HDD's are getting, its hard to not justify the cost for security.

So send me the drive and let me try. Ill try to get the data off, if im successful ill throw it on DVDs for you or even a new hard drive if you want. If I cant, then ill send it back to you, other then data recovery services or a new enclosure not much you can try really.

Any mom/pop shop can do the drive swap for you, just try to have them do it in front of you. I wouldnt leave that kinda data to just anyone. You never know what they will do with the drive when you are gone, at least you have the data in some form even if you cant access it.

DVD's are 4.5 gigs, unless you get Double Layer which are 9 gigs.

If you can stomach the price of Blu-Ray its 20 gigs. But will require a 200 dollar burner, and the DVD's arent cheap either.

In the future. You maintain one drive as the usable drive on a daily basis, and you use an identical drive for a complete backup. Get Synctoy for windows, and run it with the second drive plugged in whenever you make big changes to your data.

I recommend going with Seagate or Western Digital for an external drive.

-----
Sam, is the external enclosure USB powered?

Actual data recovery is very expensive. 500$ actually sounds on the cheaper side to do it properly. I would suggest buying a diffrent external enclosure and using that in conjuntion with the freezer trick. Also do not take it to a local place because they will not be able to recover your data properly.
Also dual layer dvd's are about 8 gigs. Standard single layer dvd's are 4.7gigs.

What about this place:
Data Recovery Services, Hard Drive Data Recovery, RAID Array Data Recovery, ADS Data Recovery Experts

I mean, I could ship it to them... but they're on my way home from work... seems pretty legit. I think I'll stop by and check it out.

Free evaluation, and if they cant help you they dont charge you sound decent enough.

If you can stop by I would definitely do it.

how serious is any home user about the integrity of their pr0n collection?

I've had the 323 for ages and it's been peachy. if a drive fails, I put in a new one and it writes everything back over.

and I also run synctoy on my my docs every night--so all the important stuff is triplicated.

I am very serious when it comes to my pron, dont even joke about it.

Yeah, I learned the backup lesson the hard way. Lost pretty much everything to a head crash on an old CDC 300 MB hard drive about 15 years ago. Since then, I'm a religious zealot about backups.

Over the years I've gone through phases. First it was QIC tape, then Syquest, then I lucked into a free Maxoptix Tahiti (with several cartridges) which lasted for years. Eventually though, it got to the point where primary hard drives were so damn big that there just weren't any affordable backup devices that came close to their capacity. DLT is awesome, but pricey, and I liked random-access.

When I upgraded my hard drive the last time, I took the old 120 GB unit out and placed it in an external (USB) enclosure. From time to time I hook that drive up and do a backup of all of my critical data; tax and investment records, porn, archived email, bookmarks, design files, etc. I don't even bother with the apps and the OS, just the data. Takes about an hour. Once that's done, the drive goes into a small fireproof safe which sits on the floor at the other end of the house. If I had a basement, it'd be on the floor there. My thinking is that should the house catch fire, I don't want it sitting on a shelf six feet in the air and then falling to the ground when the shelf collapses. The safe is waterproof, and rated for storing computer media other than tapes / floppies. Fortunately I haven't needed it thus far.

Then your fireproof case heats up from the heat and toasts your hard drive inside.

Safety deposit box that shit, Joe.

I looked at their site and they looked pretty legit. If it is on your way home I would definately check them out and let do their magic.

It's supposed to not do that- hence the point of being a fireproof safe rated for holding computer media. Realistically speaking, I live on a major road with reasonable traffic (well, for North Port anyway) and I know from past experience that the fire department's response time to my house is pretty quick. So while it might get a little scorched, I don't expect it to be sitting in burning jet fuel for hours.

(knocks on wood)

I thought about that, and also about keeping it at my sister's place. Trouble with either is that I know I'm sufficiently lazy that it'd greatly decrease the frequency with which I actually run backups, which somewhat defeats the purpose of having the device in the first place.



Curiously, I just ran across this device which while expensive, is pretty cool: | Sentry® Safe | QA0005 FIRE-SAFE® Waterproof HARD DRIVE - 250GB

That just means it wont catch on fire. ;)

I guess a good compromise position would probably to do two backups. Keep the one I've got now in the safe and update it frequently, and use one of my other externals as an offsite backup, with the understanding that it won't get updated often, but will survive a total cataclysm at the house.

I have the 320gb drive in my macbook and a 1TB external that i use for Time Machine backups. Works well thus far, I have a drive with about 400 unbacked up vacation photos that I can't retrieve. I might try the freezer technique.

PS flash memory is VERY CHEAP. when you fill up your 4 gig card, buy another 3 for $10 or something silly.

I dont know how many times I see twofer tuesdays with flash cards of various types on woot.com for under $3/gig. ninja edit. drinking makes math hard.

I went to Fry's and bought a $12 2.5" IDE enclosure... same result, it spins up a few times, squeeks a little, and then shuts off.

I stopped by the Shop I linked earlier, and I may drop it off there tomorrow. With their free estimate, at least I can find out whether it's recoverable or not. If it is, then I know I'm safe and it's just a matter of money. If it's too expensive, I can take the thing home and sit on it until I feel like looking at those pictures. I have a pretty bad feeling it's gonna be around $500 though... just gut feeling.

qft

SamNavy: I read all these posts. I've been fixing computers for 15 years, so here is what I would do in your shoes:
1. Find a friend (locally, or if that's not feasible then I can help you) who is comfortable working on your hard drive.
2. Swap the drive into another computer directly, circumvent the enclosure variable.
3. Run a bunch of diagnostic software on the drive.
4. Rescue your data.

Here's the good news: if this method doesn't work, then a data recovery service can still help you with industrial-grade software and techniques. It's not like using the aforementioned consumer-grade tools will cause any irreparable damage. So you might as well go for it or have a trusted friend go for it before spending serious dough.

Thanks for the advice. I think it's a 44?pin connector on the drive... can I buy over-the-counter software and somehow plug it into my desktop to work on it? Would I need to remove my desktop's drive, plug this one it, and somehow then use the software? I'm a little clueless, but I can follow directions... or is this something I should leave to some one who isn't clueless and doesn't need directions?

If the drive doesnt spin up you are boned no matter what you plug it into.

Spend 500 bucks and go get the data professionally recovered.