Damn I'm stupid .......

[Phantom Hawk]

Last week my home computer took a shit. I took it to get fixed and got the call today that the hard drive is bad. Ok, paying for a new hd and reloading programs is a minor headache I can live with. My stupidity comes in when they told me they couldn't retrieve any of my files from the bad hd. Me, being stupid, hadn't made back up copies of photos or documents for far too long. They're all fuckin' lost. Mostly what bothers me is the assloads of pictures of family stuff and pics my g/f and I took. Predictably, there were also pics of guitars I used to have. I'd also started a database of Jackson serial numbers with model and build dates about 5 or 6 months ago. Once I had a good number, I was gonna post it on here if anyone else was interested. It was almost up to 500. All that time I spent is now wasted. Damn I'm stupid !

[Freehill]

Do you still have the old hard drive? There are data recovery options available.

[Cygnus X1]

Man, I hope you still have the old drive.
A tip I heard once and did it...it works:

Seal the faulty drive in a ziplock, freeze it, take it out of the freezer, then plug it in.
You might be able to copy it enough to recover files.
Also, don't let the bios try to detect the drive. Put the settings in manually.
Try slaving the drive. The controller might be the only problem with it.

[Phantom Hawk]

The service place tried a data recovery thing, but they said they couldn't get anything. I told them to install a new hd, but that I wanted the old one back. I pick it up tomorrow, so I'll try your idea, Cyg. It'd sure be nice if it worked.

[thetroy]

I had a hard drive fuck up a few weeks ago. Most of the data is recoverable but the cheapest program I've found that works is $179

http://www.salvagedata.com/ is where I saw the program.

[thetroy]

Seal the faulty drive in a ziplock, freeze it, take it out of the freezer, then plug it in.

If you do this, be careful not to open the ziplock until the drive has warmed back up close to room temperature. Otherwise you will get condensation all over the drive which could really mess it up.

[Cygnus X1]

If you do this, be careful not to open the ziplock until the drive has warmed back up close to room temperature. Otherwise you will get condensation all over the drive which could really mess it up.

Yes. A rainforest isn't a good thing.
It worked for me once, on a 20 gig Western Digital.
I also had a mechanical failure on a Maxtor, that I heated up
in front of a space heater, and it "came back" for a while.

[skorb]

:ROTF: I love the trailer park hardware remedies being offered here.

[Phantom Hawk]

Thanks for the ideas, guys. I'll try some things tomorrow and see what happens.

[Cygnus X1]

:ROTF: I love the trailer park hardware remedies being offered here.

The funny part is, I ALWAYS do backups. The recovery efforts in my case were more for grins than anything. I still have old DOS garbage from 1988.

[OnlineStageGear]

It depends on what is wrong with the drive as to wether you can get any of that data back. Data in bad sectors can sometimes be recovered, but it's a crapshoot. If the brains or electronics of the drive are bad, then you are screwed. You only option then is to send it off to someone who uses a "clean room" to take the drive apart and put the Platters in another housing and get the data out that way. Last time I checked any of the places that did that they were $500-$1000.

Matt

[Phantom Hawk]

for that money, the pics, special as they are, will remain lost. I'll draw 'em with crayon I have learned my lesson, though. Always make copies !

[OnlineStageGear]

Yep, you never know when a drive can go bad like that or worse yet, your computer gets ripped off.