Damned

Please guys, pray for me. I had to install XP 3 times in the last 2 days. It seems either my IDE-Controller or my HDD is completely broken. As I use C: for windows only, my songs haven’t been deleted, my vst/rni-stuff is stored on D: and E:

But: it’s all one physical drive. Please pray for me that I can rip out that damn HDD and backup the stuff. Because then the work from 12 months is lost. completely…

hang in there brother! theres always a way.
If its a crashed hard drive you can send it to data recovery experts who can take the physical disk out of it and rip the data off with big-arse expensive machines. For considerable cost mind you…but better than losing EVERYTHING, right?
I had a wakeup call with relation to data loss a few months ago (for me luckily it ended up just being a partition problem); its a pretty shitty feeling thinking all your hard work no longer exists…for me, after that, everything important goes into a (rather costly) RAID-1 configuration…

So, I just downloaded a bootable Linux-CD with some tools. Hope this works. As the PC is just 13 months old, I can get guarantee…

But I’ll try this tool bantai recommended as well

Marc Shake: Good luck saving it. Threads like these reminds me that I should backup my stuff myself more regularly.

Btw, out of curiosity, what’s the manufacter and model of your harddrive?

It’s a Western Digital…

Oh, btw. Yesterday I decided to go out and do “something” with my gf. Guess what. The exhaust-pipe of my car fell off. Now I have a broken PC and a broken car. At least I could start this linux-cd. Today I am gonna burn my songs, the samples on DVD. If the mp3 and videos get lost, I can download them again, I guess.

amongst others i am also using two Western Digitals (WD740GD) in a striped raid array here. bought them 1 1/2 years ago and so far i am keeping my fingers crossed.
only drives (two of’em) which ever failed on me were those of the IBM 60GXP “deskstar” (lateron aka “deathstar” ;/) series.
don’t know about the temps, but as they’re actively cooled by a 80mm fan i’m not too worried.
besides that, i also do backups on a weekly basis, since all my music is stored on them.

concerning temps:
i do also have a Seagate Barracuda IV 40GB drive in my 2ndary PC, which is absolutely noiseless due to passive cooling only.
this drives peaks at 56°C during hot summer days and it’s already growing a beard being ~5 years old - no problems whatsoever! :)

temperature is one factor which can make a drive fail, but afterall there a dozens of others being in crucial as well.
amongst all of them, the most striking seems to be “bad luck”…

does that imply you were able to access the other two partitions and they were healthy?
if so, i wanna congratulate.
this could’ve turned out way worse i guess.

Keith303: I have the same experience as you, crappy IBM Deskstar (30gb size in my case if my memory is not mistaking) with some experimental material that they found out didn’t work out quite well - it never crashed but I had some bad sectors on it. Felt very unsafe when I found out of that.

Using 2 Seagate Barracudas at the moment, 40 gig / 120 gig. No problems so far and yes, they’re very silent. Also had some good experience with Western Digital Caviar in the past. (but that’s almost 12 years ago :) )

Bantai: "Which type? And how warm does it get? " - I first thought you were talking about the exhaust-pipe on Marc Shakes car! :smiley:

@junoir
it’s only been the 60GXP series, other than that, ibm or meanwhile hitachi, is very reliable. i used to have two 45GB ibm’s in raid-0 and wow - that head-noise which went like "crrrrk-crrrk (silence) crrrk-crrrrk (silence) [loop]) was very disturbing.
back then, i lost a lot of data incl. some non-backuped ft2 xm.
i also had two 120GB hitachis - the 180GXP series - which are meanwhile running in my brother’s PC and are still up & running.

but my absolutely upmost respect goes to that seemingly unbreakable seagate 400MB (0,4GB) harddrive from 1992, which i still have a bill saying “1029,- DM” (~500 EUR) from.
after all these years, it still works and does its duty in my ms-dos7 pc :)

edit
sorry, just noticed that i’m quite a nerd, lol :ph34r:

I’ve been in that situation time and time again… and what have I learned from it? BACK UP REGULARLY!!!

he marc!
always the word backup pops up if you come with these problems…
well you should :)

If you can not get an operating system running on your HDD again
try to hang it on an other computer.
you may be able to copy that important data to the other disk
If that doesn’t work, you can also try Bantai recommentments or alikes
to get that data savely recoverd and copied. and get your spine back to rest.

for your exhaust pipe… not my proffesion.

Good luck, I know how it feels

So, one update. I am sitting at my PC now. I got it back from my retailer and he did not find anything (sigh) but I installed Ontrack Disc Recovery and the HDD is definetely broken. At the moment, I am burning a lot of CDs with all my samples, songs etc.

Next week, I am going to visit the shop again and present the log-file, ontrack gave me. Installing windows daily is a fine hobby :)

The exhaust-pipe is brand new and at least my car works perfect again.

Oh, btw. it is a WD 1600bb-gua01 hdd. and HDD-repair is nice but as I still have guarantee on this hdd and the sample and song-partition are backuped now, I think, I won’t need this tool