xiven.com stating the blatantly obvious since 2002

Everybody's dead Dave

My computer's hard drive is no more. It is a dead hard drive. It ceases to function.

It died last Friday night and it refuses to let me get my files off it.

Since I am not willing (or indeed able) to pay £700+ for a professional data recovery of the drive this is a summary of the situation:

Not too bad:

Bad:

Very bad:

So if you're wondering why I haven't done the export of the Galactic Report from the Voidwars dev game yet, now you know why.

Posted: 2003-04-14 07:36:38 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (1) | Comments (10)

Comments

  • Freaky (2003-04-14 09:18:01 UTC)

    Suck. What was the failure mode? You can sometimes recover temporarily from sticktion (where the head sticks to the lubricant on the landing zone on the platter) by giving the drive a short, sharp tap to the top, and fried electronics can sometimes be overcome with those from an identical drive enough to get some information off.

    What make/model was it, btw?

  • Xiven (Registered) (2003-04-14 12:19:12 UTC)

    It was a Maxtor 4K060H3 otherwise known as a 60GB DiamondMax 540X.

    "Failure mode"? What do you mean? It pretty much just stopped working, to the point that the BIOS has trouble recognising it (it works just about if I attach it as slave on the standard IDE interface and reboot a few times) and the Powermax tool from Maxtor won't even touch it (can't remember what error code it gave).

    I'm not too desparate to get the data back, what I am most concerned about is getting a replacement drive from Maxtor (and if I start shaking it about, they might decide to reject it as "excessive shock").

  • Kamakaze (2003-04-21 08:24:20 UTC)

    Yes hard drives dying is annoying

  • Tim Scarfe (2003-04-26 17:45:31 UTC)

    RAID is a great thing. Buy 2 disks (RAID 0) and get your ass familiar with the Computer Management/Disk Administrator screen!

  • Xiven (Registered) (2003-04-27 05:07:52 UTC)

    Yes I agree RAID mirroring is a very nice thing. In fact my motherboard has a built-in RAID controller (so I would use that instead of the Windows software method). The only issue is that it requires me to buy another hard drive...

  • Tim Scarfe (2003-04-30 13:20:07 UTC)

    Erm, Yep. Is that a problem?

  • Tim Scarfe (2003-04-30 13:21:51 UTC)

    Ohh, and while I'm here; I meant RAID 1, not 0. Must have been in a coma when I commented!

  • Xiven (Registered) (2003-04-30 16:12:53 UTC)

    Actually it's not a problem...

  • Anonymous (2003-08-06 07:57:10 UTC)

    You may be able to change the logic board.
    Check this out :
    http://www.deadharddrive.com

  • Tim Scarfe (2005-08-09 14:55:29 UTC)

    Hey! just wanted to say hi to my name twin...see above....hello!