harddrive head crash - Calgarypuck Forums - The Unofficial Calgary Flames Fan Community

Hack&Lube · 03-15-2010, 05:20 PM

So I have a Seagate 500GB drive that seems to have suffered a head crash in the past week. It makes a springy sound and then makes a noise that sounds like beeping but is probably the arm clicking or trying to dislodge or something.

Has anybody used a data recovery service for a severe problem like this? I'm think it's mechanical and not just the PCB which would be easier.

What was the price range?

FanIn80 · 03-15-2010, 05:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

So I have a Seagate 500GB drive that seems to have suffered a head crash in the past week. It makes a springy sound and then makes a noise that sounds like beeping but is probably the arm clicking or trying to dislodge or something.

Has anybody used a data recovery service for a severe problem like this? I'm think it's mechanical and not just the PCB which would be easier.

What was the price range?

The last time I sent a hard drive to a data recovery service (for my boss at the time), they wanted over $1000 to recover his pst file from it. I can't remember the name of the place, though, since we pretty quickly decided to just toss the pst file and try to recover his emails from historical backups.

Hack&Lube · 03-15-2010, 05:40 PM

Stupid!!! Some days I HATE COMPUTERS. I was just about to back up this drive a month ago and then a friend asked to borrow the enclosure that was holding it so I took it out and set it on a shelf for a month and never touched it. When I got the enclosure back, I put it back in and the rest (and the drive) is history.

I'll keep the drive on the shelf. One day (when I am rich), I might send it for recovery. There's just some photos and videos I want back, the rest I don't care about really.

LockedOut · 03-15-2010, 07:43 PM

Did you try the freezing trick? If it works it might give you enough time to recover any important data.

Hack&Lube · 03-15-2010, 08:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by LockedOut

Did you try the freezing trick? If it works it might give you enough time to recover any important data.

I tried the freezer trick with 2 hours in the fridge and no dice. Should I try for overnight?

LockedOut · 03-15-2010, 08:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

I tried the freezer trick with 2 hours in the fridge and no dice. Should I try for overnight?

It doesn't hurt to try but I doubt it'll make a difference. 2 hours should be enough to freeze it.

psicodude · 03-15-2010, 09:41 PM

We used this place: http://www.computerpi.com/ which is in the NE.

I believe the final bill was in the $1300 dollar range to get just under 2GB of data off of what was essentially a brick. It took about a week. I figured it was a complete rip off, but the executive it was for thought it was peanuts when compared to what he stood to lose.

Raekwon · 03-15-2010, 10:27 PM

I can't believe the freezer trick actually works, tried on a co-workers drive a few weeks back. Got it running long enough to pull the data. Damn store were charging insane amounts like $100/GB.

llama64 · 03-16-2010, 08:25 AM

Date recovery rates may seem "insane" if all you have to lose is your music and porn collection - but if you failed to backup important documents, trade secrets or project files that hundreds of hours have gone into then $100/GB is pretty darn reasonable.

Course I'm a cheap ass so I have an automatic backup system in place. Figured I'd spend $150 up front and avoid having to spend $1000 when my drives go down.

I absolutely hate how cheap hard drives are made these days. I seem to go through one or two drives every year - biggest pain in the ass.

calculoso · 03-16-2010, 10:05 AM

What's the easiest way to transfer hard drives? I have a Windows 7 computer that appears to be having HD issues. The disk check on startup finds problems, it restarts, checks again, finds the same problems, restarts, etc. I left this running over night once and it kept going and going. Finally aborted it, but I assume this is some kind of a warning sign?

GoinAllTheWay · 03-16-2010, 01:22 PM

This is exaclty why every home that has sentimental pictures and videos should invest in a Windows Home Server.

Rathji · 03-16-2010, 07:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by calculoso

What's the easiest way to transfer hard drives? I have a Windows 7 computer that appears to be having HD issues. The disk check on startup finds problems, it restarts, checks again, finds the same problems, restarts, etc. I left this running over night once and it kept going and going. Finally aborted it, but I assume this is some kind of a warning sign?

edit: Wow did I misread his post. Ignore me

Rathji · 03-16-2010, 07:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by GoinAllTheWay

This is exaclty why every home that has sentimental pictures and videos should invest in a Windows Home Server.

Or a Mozy subscription. 5 bucks a month for unlimited online storage is the win

FlamingStuffedTiger · 03-16-2010, 07:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by calculoso

What's the easiest way to transfer hard drives? I have a Windows 7 computer that appears to be having HD issues. The disk check on startup finds problems, it restarts, checks again, finds the same problems, restarts, etc. I left this running over night once and it kept going and going. Finally aborted it, but I assume this is some kind of a warning sign?

So, I'm assuming you might be having trouble booting into the OS... if we make the further assumption that your hard drive is not already completely borked, then it might be possible to use a specialized Linux distro like Knoppix to pull off the more important files before you do a full fledged re-installation on a brand new hard drive. I can elaborate if you need some further help on that...

Otherwise, I vote for Acronis TrueImage, which is what I currently use.

calculoso · 03-17-2010, 01:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by FlamingStuffedTiger

So, I'm assuming you might be having trouble booting into the OS... if we make the further assumption that your hard drive is not already completely borked, then it might be possible to use a specialized Linux distro like Knoppix to pull off the more important files before you do a full fledged re-installation on a brand new hard drive. I can elaborate if you need some further help on that...

Otherwise, I vote for Acronis TrueImage, which is what I currently use.

I'm not having any problems that I know about, but I assume that this is a warning of some kind that I should at lease backup my system. I don't want to have to re-install everything, especially those apps I got from GiveAwayOfTheDay.

I'll look at TrueImage. Is it best to make an image and just restore the image to another hard drive? Anything else (licenses tied to hard drive?) that I should know about?