Community weekly poll: When did you last experience a complete hard disk failure?
- 12/7/05 4:00 PM
Backup hardware failure
by Davetimh - 12/9/05 2:56 AM In reply to: Hardware failure by TwinkleI just bought a Lacie hard drive to back up my files, because of posts on this site that drove fear into me. I own a small business and couldn't take the loss of data. After successfully using it for a couple of weeks, I went to save some stuff and the hard drive told me it needed to be formatted. I couldn't get around this, so formatted and subsequently lost all of the data when formatting took place. Fortunately my main hard drive was still good. I backed up everthing again on the formatted drive and then bought a bunch of CD-R's and started another backup regiment. Anyone know why the drive all of sudden needed formatting and any workaround if it happens again?
Laptop Failure
by John Gahring - 12/9/05 2:57 AM In reply to: When did you last experience a complete hard disk failure? by Marc Bennett
While using my laptop one day it suddenly started loading (or re-loading) all the drivers. It could not be stopped and after it stopped working the display was super-size and nothing worked correctly. I messed with it and messed with it and finally gave up. A friend, a very knowledgeable company network manager, attempted for a week to salvage the laptop to no avail. One evening while working with the laptop his 4 year old Emma said, "Daddy, why is that dot yellow?" I do not remember which dot it was now but when her father saw the dot he quickly corrected most of the problem but some elements still did not return to normal. The Presario 1690 crashed completely two times before causing the need to do a reformat from the install disc which required the updating again of many, many programs to include the OS. Needless to say, I am not a fan of the Presario! I went back to a desktop.
Try This For HD Failures!
by mihalovits - 12/9/05 3:11 AM In reply to: When did you last experience a complete hard disk failure? by Marc Bennett
My hard drive failed completely about 3 months ago, along with over a gigabyte of technical photos that took me 2 months to take and edit. I KNEW I had backed up onto CDs, but couldn't find them anywhere.
I turned the hard drive on its side and was able to read the files (it was my secondary drive) long enough to recover them all.
Sometimes a hard drive fails because of bad bearings. As you can imagine, the clearance is very critical for hard drives and turning it on the side might allow it to work temporarily. I've used this trick a few times. Next time try it, what have you got to lose that you haven't already lost?
try hdd regenerator
by alcasdo - 12/9/05 4:51 AM In reply to: Try This For HD Failures! by mihalovitsmost hard disk failures are caused by magnetization.
you can solve it running hdd regenerator, a russian program that you can downloads free (the demo version)
try it, it's just incredible
"magnetization" not cause of "most" HDD failures
by jmagecko - 12/9/05 7:49 AM In reply to: try hdd regenerator by alcasdoSorry, but if you're talking about data state changes due to "weakening" magnetic fields on the platters, then you aren't correct.
MOST disk drive failures are mechanical or electronic subsystem failures. These are far more frequent than any other disk drive failure mode.
Other frequent "disk failures" are caused by poorly written or corrupted software, main power or power supply faults/failures, improper operating environment temperatures, and/or signal quality problems. Although often put in this category these are NOT technically disk drive failures at all.
The technique works sometime...
by Zeppo - 12/9/05 9:15 AM In reply to: Try This For HD Failures! by mihalovitsI've rarely experienced a total hard drive failure, and I've been computing since 1984. But I have had hard drives no longer boot up and I just make them into a slave drive to see if I can access the data on them. I almost always can.
I did have one hard drive that had intermittent problems at being recognized by Windows. It would work sometimes and not others. Well, this drive did work when I put it up on end inside the computer case. It did for quite a long time until one day it simply would not operate no matter how I placed. However, by that time I had everything backed up that I wanted.
DELL Notebook Hard Drive Help
by wolrabnodrogl - 12/9/05 11:07 AM In reply to: The technique works sometime... by ZeppoHow do you "make a slave drive"? I think someone once explained it to me, but I've since forgotten.
I remember someone explaining something about purchasing a secondary hard drive for the notebook, and switching some cable ribbon around or something. What do I need to purchase, what brand, what store would be best to walk-into and get this from (we can't wait any longer to get the notebook up and running)?
There are so many issues the computer seems to be experiencing. Although it isn't recognizing a hard drive and won't let me delete partitions, install Windows (from the DELL recovery CD), etc.
My husband hasn't installed any new software or hardware...but last week he got the good 'ol "blue screen'. We've had error messages about the HAL.dll file missing, then something about IDE, and all sorts of others at this point.
I backed everything up for him about 2 weeks ago, so I'm not terribly concerned about him losing data (although it would be great NOT to lose it if possible).
It won't even go into Safe Mode for me...which I would think would be an OS issue. I'm stumped. I even tried to see if I could figure-out how to make a second partition using a Windows 98 CD.
We're really in a bind because it's right before Christmas and we do a ton of on-line shopping: (
Thank you!!!
Sorry - this reply is well after Christmas
by Zeppo - 1/20/06 11:53 AM In reply to: DELL Notebook Hard Drive Help by wolrabnodroglI could tell you how to make a slave drive for a desktop system, and I would bet it is the same for a laptop, but it may be more practical to buy an external USB hard drive enclosure for a laptop hard drive (2 1/2'').
You would need to replace the existing hard drive in the laptop and install the operating system, but could, once replaced and the old drive in an external enclosure, try to pull data off the old one through the USB port. If the drive seems to work fine that way, you could simply reformat the old hard drive (after you have retrieved all data needed) and use it as an external backup drive for any computer you have.
Go here for step-by-step instructions to make a laptop hard drive an external one: http://www.allcam.biz/support/fixusbhdd.html
You can also try SpinRite 6.0
by mpeer - 12/9/05 10:03 AM In reply to: Try This For HD Failures! by mihalovitsThis is not a commercial I swear! I build/rebuild a lot of computers for friends and family. A few times they've come to me with drives that no longer read any data. More often than not I could get them going by using SpinRite 6.0 from www.grc.com. A few Western Digital drives would not work even after using WD CD 11.1 but I was still able to repair them with SpinRite. Hope this helps someone out there.....
apparently HP was lazy
by jean_lord - 12/9/05 3:18 AM In reply to: When did you last experience a complete hard disk failure? by Marc Bennett
After much poking and help, my gurus finally discovered the basic problem with my hard crashed HP Pavillion 521n, which I had bought with XP installed -- HP had installed the XP on TOP of Windows ME. Thus when it crashed, up popped the Windows ME stuff, which of course didn't work since the rest was XP (or something like that). ANYway, when we couldn't access the restore functions properly after many hours of trying, I had to call in and purchase the set of CDs and do a full reinstall of everything on my own. I apparently didn't get it quite right as I now have problems I didn't experience before.
WHY didn't HP clear the disks before installing XP! They pretty much guaranteed an unrecoverable crash, in my case beyond their initial warranty, of course.
hard Disk failure.
by Weston - 12/9/05 3:49 AM In reply to: When did you last experience a complete hard disk failure? by Marc Bennett
I had an AST server running Novell 3.1. One morning it just would not boot up. lost everything and had no backups. tried every trick in the book....incl putting in fridge/freezer...no go..dont now use a server, just individual PC..
Hard Disk failure - Graphics Card failure-what happened
by Veejay14 - 12/9/05 3:57 AM In reply to: When did you last experience a complete hard disk failure? by Marc Bennett
My Radeon 9800 failed and whilst trying to discover what was wrong - using an unreadable screen - I caused a major problem somewhere and then sent the PC back to JAL Computers for replacement of the Graphics Card.
They used the "excuse" that the hard drive had also crashed badly to reinstall Win XP Pro, Service Pack 2 and SOME of my other programs. This wiped out all my data and, unusually for me, I had not backed it up. I'm just now learning how to burn to CD and DVD because I was only used to Iomega Zip and Floppies on my old machine.
I no longer have trust in my machine and have so far been unable to install and use the Digital TV Card & Software that came with it without causing what looks like another breakdown of the new Graphics Card (NVidia GeForce 6). Not a happy PV User at present!
John, York, UK
Western Digital
by fast_dude007 - 12/9/05 4:00 AM In reply to: When did you last experience a complete hard disk failure? by Marc Bennett
Over the past few years I had one computer which the western digital hard drive made some scraping noises before it stoped working. The hard drive was three years old and my computer runs about 10 hours a day. Not sure what the average life span of a harddrive is?
three in two weeks
by Romasteve - 12/9/05 4:24 AM In reply to: When did you last experience a complete hard disk failure? by Marc Bennett
Once who knows how, a second when I tried using an HD that was cloned by Acronis 8 and the third when an update for Quicken failed and when I rebooted (following the advice of Quicken) when it would not boot and asked me to reinstall HAL.DLL. I took the HD from my laptop and connected with a USB caddy to another computer and copied the .dll to system32 as directed. It did not recognize and could use no other repair so reinstalled Windows but to another directory....Windows1...and managed to save almost everything the was in different folders.
Windows XP SP 2 and all updates as of last week.
Sanders in Rome
Just a few days ago
by davidkirk - 12/9/05 4:42 AM In reply to: When did you last experience a complete hard disk failure? by Marc Bennett
This is my second hard drive failure in the last few months (with different machines). Fortunately, I use a backup device called a Mirra server which dynamically backs up all files on the server and allows me to access them from any other machine. This means that although it is inconvenient to fix the machine and re-load software, it is then a very simple process to recover all files, including MS Outlook .pst files.
At times like these, the backup solution seems like money very well spent (all my photos and music are safe!)
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