Our ReVolt Pub

The hard drive which was hosting not only my OS / program files partition but also the partition I use for all my works / personal documents has just irremediably failed...

I can hardly believe it! I was not home this WE, when I came back I ran my computer for a few hours without any issue, but Monday morning when I turned my computer on again, I heard this typical hdd head noise, and the computer stalled at the BIOS screen looking for the boot device... And I just can't remember any early warning signs of hdd failure, there was neither storm during the night nor any electric device malfunction I can remember of.

I call it bad luck... The same story already happened to me a few years ago, and that was something I hoped to never live again (both hdds were Western Digital BTW, I guess it'll take long before I ever buy anything from this company again). Fortunately I remembered the lesson and now I use to backup my work from time to time. Unfortunately though, my last backup was a month and a half ago... So I have lost everything I did since, which as far as Re-Volt is concerned includes some v1.2 work I have not shared with Huki yet (mostly Rooftop related) and a great amount of work on the Blender Addon.

Well, currently I'm running an old and terribly slow 10GB hdd. I have to finish a job I've spent the whole last week on, which was practially done but that I have to start from scratch again. So I have no idea when I'll be able to work for Re-Volt again, and if I'll ever get the motivation to replicate all the work I've lost.


EDIT:
Oh, and if by luck anyone owns an old Western Digital WD800BB-00JHC0, I would gladly buy it as a last-chance attempt to get something out of it through a PCB hotswap, even though I have little to no hope it would work in this case...

Sad to know that Jig. I hope you could retrieve back all the data you lost.

Gosh, Jig, I’m really sorry to hear that... Is there any computer repair shop near you that could try recovering your data?

For future: (just a friendly recommendation)
Use IDrive. Set its desktop application to continuous backup and point it to your important files. It backs those up online, automatically, and with versioning.
Or use Cobian and a local USB stick. Cobian is automatic, too.
Or use both.

And see around for that repair shop!

So, can you just not read the data, or will it not power up at all? I've had good success with a program that I believe was called Restorer 2000. With that I was able to hook up the bad one on the second IDE channel after setting up another as the boot drive, then I was able to recover quite a few important files.

That's what happened to all the stuff I did for Morrowind and Tribes:Vengeance. I'm pretty sure all my pretty particle effects and tons of AI combined with a max draw distance is what finally ended up frying my board...no, wait...I think I lost that stuff when my hdd crapped out during a defrag. Anyway, I never even installed the games again on this system...I think that may have been what got me looking for some other way to waste my time and have some fun.

And that brought me to you.

Whatever...try that program.

Mythic

@Pranav - Hmm, no, there's unfortunately no hope I'll retrieve anything now.

@CW - A computer repair shop can't handle that kind of failure. Data recovery on a dead hdd is a job for a specialist company. Usually they don't charge you if they can't recover anything, but it cost a lot otherwise. For my previous hdd, I was ready to pay so, hopeful, I sent it to that kind of company. But they have not been able to fix / recover anything. I guess they could if I were a big company ready to pay the price, but I was only a private individual so they just send me back my hdd with no extra info...

As I'm not sure this is the exact same failure, I could try to send this hdd the same way for a recovery attempt, but this time I have lost way less data, only the last month work, so I'm less ready to paid the big price.

About backup, I was using Unison. It's not very friendly to set-up but it does what I need (there is no versioning though). Don't know why backing-up has not came to my mind these last weeks...

@MM - It does power up but that's all. It spins up, the head moves 3 times and it spins down... It's not even seen in the BIOS. It's actually a hardware failure, not just a damaged partition of stuff like that, so there's nothing I can do with recovery software.

Are you sure the cables to your HDD aren't loose?


I kid, this isn't the time for joking. I'm sorry that this happened to you. But at least you learnt a lesson: backup your files more often.

Well, I'm sorry the repair shop option is moot...

Anyway, if you had to remember to backup manually, then Unison is not the right type of backup solution for you. Such things should be automatic. Finish something you want to keep, copy it to your wips storage folder, and in 10 minutes or less the backup program takes it from that folder, on its own.
Or just point the backup program to the work file/folder itself, if its not too large or cluttered. It's even more automatic/sure this way.
I've survived two crashes thanks to this process, no data lost.

wow thats sad to hear and scary at the same time (since it happened so suddenly).

my laptop's hdd died once too (didn't turn on anymore), luckily I managed to find an almost identical model on ebay (same model and it was produced in the same month) for about 30€, swapped the controllers and it worked again

so you might want to try your luck searching around on online markets...

and a month old backup is better than nothing

Hi

If it a mechanical problem and the drive is not spinning at all then you either need loads of money or the cost of a replacement drive.

If its still spinning even if it s making a metalic tinking noise then you have a short period of time to repair the drive.

I use a program called Spinrite. www.grc.com
Its about £60 or $80 USD ( they are based in USA )

Get this burn the small file that it is to a cd or to a usb stick

then run on level 1 then 2 or 4, this may take a few hours to a number of days.

If during the process you see 1 red block very early on then this may be the boot sector that has a critical file on it that the pc etc needs for the boot. Then you can end the process early ( make note of % tho)

and then try the drive again.

Good Luck!


LC