Petri

This is a long and painful story but here's the short version:

My relatively new 45-gigabyte IBM Deskstar started randomly corrupting files some time ago, and after I lost a couple of my better photos I was pissed enough to take it to my PC dealer. They immediately sent it to IBM Finland and gave me a new 40-gig Deskstar to play with while waiting for the "official" replacement. I told them that the replacement drive has to be at least 45 gigs, preferably 60 and yes, I'm willing to pay the price difference.

So, I've had the 40-gig drive for about 2 weeks and this morning it decided to die on me. No warnings, nothing. Bios still recognizes the drive and Windows 98 SE assigns a drive letter to it but it doesn't work anymore. I've tried different IDE cables, all master/slave combinations. Nada. No disk access, only "resource is not working" message. Must be a controller failure or read/write head failure or something of the kind.

So what's the problem, you ask. It's not yours, so no money lost. True, but no points for guessing the name of the lazy IDIOT who hasn't made any major CD-R backups since early summer! About 20 gigabytes of photos and music gone to IT heaven. Luckily I have some photos stored on PhotoPoint server and on my work PC and I made a backup copy of photos I took in Norway in July and at my friend's wedding in June (I was the official photographer there) but that's about it. Almost all other photos I took last summer and this fall are gone. So if you happen to see any of my recent photos somewhere on the net, you are probably looking at the only existing copies.

I guess I have to send also this drive to IBM and hope they can fix it but I don't like the idea of someone going through the contents of my hard disk. But then again, my stupidity has pretty much limited my options. Let me tell you, this is not a fun way to start a weekend, sigh...

Now I'm going to Sauna and I'll stay there until I've cooled down enough ;-)

Pete

TTschwing

Aaaaarrrgghhh....sorry Pete, HOPE they can be saved.

TTom TTR

If you hear the drive spinning up, and it 'sounds' normal (IE no really weird grinding noises, indicating a physical failure)

You can always try this, that is if you are desperate.

Get an identical drive, swap the electronics on the bottom.

90% of the time, the type of error you are describing is the electronics of the drive, not the physical drive itself. Meaning you data is there, but your drive electronics can't get at it.

Now, I believe swapping the electronics board violates the warranty, but, if you are desperate... Also, if there are not 'void if torn' seals on the bottom, they won't know the diff unless you strip all the screws because you don't go to the store to get the right kind of screwdriver (torx, whatever, don't know what it takes)

plus you can get a 40GB IBM Desktar 7200RPM Drive for $100. Are your missing pictures worth more than $100 to you? (www.mwave.com is where I get mine for $100) Then void the warranty, swap the parts & see what happens.

I've done this several times, but YMMV. You can't hold me responsible if you toast it. I've been in desperate situations in a corporate environment where I had a stack of old hard disks to work with and data was needed. This worked every time for me AS LONG AS there was no 'weird noises' indicating a physical failure of the drive medium.

Hope that helps....

Bahookie

Also, as a last resort, look into using a data recovery service (expensive)

Petri

Thanks for the advice, Tom! The drive spins up ok without any weird noises so there's probably something wrong with the electronics board as you suspected. If I send it to IBM, they can probably fix it very quickly and it won't cost me anything. I don't have any confidential work documents on the drive so I think I'm going to take my chances and let them fix it if possible.

Pete

Petri

Might be a bit too expensive since I don't really have any invaluable data on that disk.

suiTTman

On that note - I am copying all my photos to CD right now !!

PorTTland

Friday a week ago my second drive in my PC suddenly gave the exact same symptoms that you described. Mine is a 40G Maxtor. And like you, this drive was where all of my photos are stored, and many are not backed up.

Here is what I have done and will do:
1) I obtained drive diagnostic software from the drive manufacturers website. It was able to access the drive and begin a check of the drive that failed after scanning the disk for a few minutes. The error code basically said "replace drive" :-( But at least I knew the drive electronics were OK.

2) I looked into data recovery services, but it looked like a starting price is $200 and goes up from there depending on the particular circumstances.

3) I found a company that sells software that allows you to recover your own disk by copying files off of the corrupt disk to another drive. The software is $179. They sell a stripped version that will only let you recover 25 files for $25. And you can download the trial version which will scan your whole drive and list all of the files/directories/file-sizes that can be recovered. I ran the trial version and it found everything on my drive but the directories had generic names like DIR0, DIR1, DIR2 which I think means that I had some logical error that blew away that block on the drive (but I don't really know what I'm talking about). The software took about 4 hours to completely scan my 40G drive.

4) Maxtor will swap my drive under warranty and let me have a new drive for 30 days before I must return the bad drive. So if I spend $179 for the software, I can recover my disk in the privacy of my own home. I like this.

I will probably get the Maxtor replacement this coming week, and attempt recovery next Saturday. I'll let you know how things go for me.<ul><li><a href="http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecovery/">http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecovery/</a</li></ul>

Petri

Thanks for the info and the link, Craig!

I took a chance and formatted the drive (managed to do that from DOS) and now it's again accessible from Windows - so the electronics seem to be ok. Right now I'm testing dtidata's recovery software. 3 hours 8 mins until the scan is completed. This is also a trial version but at least I get to see if there's anything left to rescue. If there is, then I start calling friends and checking if anyone has recovery software.

I think I'll test that Ontrack software as well before I decide what to buy.

Back to Sauna...

Pete

PorTTland

I really get what I deserve, I am too lazy to backup until disaster strikes. But I have been very lucky for almost 20 years at work and at home and I never had a hard drive problem until now. I will be much less confident in drives in the future now that I have been "bitten".

I may consider getting an 80G firewire external drive for backups since those things are getting more affordable. It is much faster to back up a drive to another drive than to any other type of media. I think I would perform backups more regularly if it was more effortless than CD-R. I never thouht I would think of 650M as being small, but these days it is very small, since I have thousands of photos over 1M each and some digital videos that are easily over 1G each.

I wish you luck! It is encouraging that the format was able to work, so that means your drive electronics are OK and you probably can still recover your data. I do wonder what effect the format will have on your data. Maybe someone here can say?