Good advice

[paulhbell]

Ok, first thing I have to say is "BACK EVERYTHING UP" on your computer. More than once if you can.

I was one of those people who thinks it will never happen to me, but over the last 2 weeks I've been having a nightmare with a broken desktop computer. I am quite good with computers and always repair and upgrade my own systems.

So after filling 2 500Gb hard drives full of data, I thought it was time to put another drive into the computer. I bought a 2Tb sata drive, fitted it in the case, made sure everything was secure. Powered up, NOTHING.

Started to panic.

I took the new drive out, and powered up just with my old drives, NOTHING AGAIN. Not even a beep from the bios.

Really starting to panic.

I took the new drive back to the shop and it was tested as working, but the guy there was good enough to give my money back. But I now have a dead desktop computer. I have tried the old drives in a USB cradle and the drives are not showing any data.

I don't know what caused the whole system to crash, maybe it was just time for my computer to give up on life, a friend now has had the drives for 2 days and he said that one drive is a complete loss, the other one may get some data back.

So back to my first sentence in this post, Please everyone BACK UP ALL YOU'RE DATA. I have lost a lot of photos, card model files, family movies, music, work data, the list go's on.

 

[zathros]

Did you format you old drives? If not, the data should be there. I would suggest getting this device, which comes with it's own power supply for the hard drives. It is a 66 in on memory reader. IDE, SATA,eSATA, SD,Compact Flash, too much to list, you name it, it reads it. It is also hot swappable (just pull out power supply to hard drives first). I make money using this device for data recovery. It's only $18.00 dollars!! This device works really super well.


http://www.amazon.com/Vantec-CB-ISA...p/B000J01I1G/ref=rec_dp_0/180-2828365-7113943

 

[paulhbell]

No, I didn't format the drives. The guy that has the drives now, he asked me that as well, I have recovered data even from formatted drives in the past. But this time it beat me. One of the drives is totally dead, don't spin, no noise at all. He's talking about taking the platters out and putting them in a replacement drive.

I have a usb reader that I can plug any drive into, tried that.

What annoyed me more is the fact that the motherboard is dead as well. I did all the correct things before starting the change as well, grounding myself to protect the computer from spikes etc.

The laptop I'm on at the moment is good enough to do any work I need, so I will live with it for now.

 

[zathros]

Unless he has a clean room, he will not be able to change the plates as it will kill them with contamination. A better solution would be to change the electronic circuit board from an identical drive and see if you can get it to spin it up. A one micron spot of contamination is like MT. Everest and it will destroy the swiper arm. You have to have a clean room. If he does, then kudos to him. That's a good friend to have. I think you destroyed the boot sector of the drive. I would tr rebuilding that. You aren't trying to rebuild the drive, you just want to make the drive readable so you can download the data. Good and best luck to you!

 

[Bhelliom]

Sorry to hear about that, Paul. Between your friend, and what Zathros said, it does sound promising, though.


Zathros, I have an old drive that still spins, but makes "bad" noises when its running I can only read data from the backup partition, and it takes forever just to do that. Do you think that reader would be able to get the data off the main partition? If so, I'll have to try to get one once I get back on my feet.


Scott K.

 

[zathros]

Basically, I would do a cop and paste onto a folder on your good drive and take whatever you can get. Put it in a freezer first, as that may keep the bearings from squealing so much. Being cool is better than being warm, for electronics.

 

[Bhelliom]

I did try the freezer trick, with no improvement. I can still only access the D drive, which only has the compac recovery data on it. The C partition says it needs formatting.

Looks like I'll just have to wait until I'm wealthy enough to afford a recovery service.


Scott K.

 

[paulhbell]

A quick update, both 500Gb drives are fried. Looks like one of the drive arms got stuck and scratched the platter in one of the drives.

As for the rest of the bits in the case, all been stripped, cleaned and put back together. Turned on and fans spin up. Sometimes the bios boots up, sometimes not. But when it boots and I leave it on for a while, or try to install a operating system the system just shuts down.

Also one of the pcie graphic cards I had in the case is fried.

So, I've have decided to build another system. It was about 5 years old anyway.

On top of all this happening, my internet provider decided to change my number without telling me. They say it is just crossed lines. When I phone the operator I get connected to another provider. For now only internet I have is mobile.