So my brother was watching Top Gear this morning on the media PC and when I got back in from work mentioned it was making a fucking horrible scratching noise. After some investigation I've found the cause - the 1 year, 3 month old Seagate HDD inside it seems to have gone bust - and guess who got bought by Seagate about 2 years ago? YES, FUCKING MAXTOR! Once again I've lost another drive to these fuckers - I won't be buying Seagate again. Back to the point: The PC (JUST) boots sometimes with the Seagate in. S-L-O-W-L-Y. And when it does it either hasn't got the disc present (most of the time) or it is there as an unformatted disc (once, but the computrer was so slow as to be unusable). It makes a noise like nails scratching on blackboards whenever it accesses the disc. The thing is fucked, I accept this. However, due to some bollocks regarding OEM and resellers, Seagate no longer support a warranty on it (ran out in May) and though eBuyer is saying it'll honour the original advertised warranty of 5 years (seems there was some sort of mixup on the store), ideally I'd like to get the data off - though it would also be nice to get a repair/replacement - can;t do that until Monday though. There's a lot of TV rips on it that although I can get again will take fucking ages to do so. tl;dr - my lounge now looks like this: Suggest to me a way to get the data off this thing - I'm running out of ideas.. Right now that fan is going full-pelt in an effort to cool the disc to help the platters (unknown if actually working), and the 360 box is there to get the disc in position of the fan. I have a HDD on the PC that can easily take every piece of data on the Seagate, so that isn't a problem.
I am seriously considering freezing it, yes. I was just wondering if anyone else had any thoughts before I subjected it to a freezebag =P
Aughghghh, PENIS. BIG PENIS. That sucks, man... I have a couple of maxtor disks, and they've survived years. The only failed drives I know of were my sister's, and they were Deskstar and Seagate (both bought in or before mid-2005). PENIS. PENIS. Listen, you need to freeze the disk and then copy the data immediately. Also, there's some trick I heard where you fill the freezebag with some kind of rice to stop condensation from being a problem. Get cockin', son. Whooooooough!!! PEEEEEEEEEEEEEENIS!!!!! MENIS FENIS BENIS GENIS DENIS.
Sheesh, that's what I hate about hard disks. The technology in them is very prone to failure, luckily I have never lost any hard disk completely, only some sectors on them. I hope than in the future we will be using SSDs, they have no parts that move and so they don't get damaged like that. But they're too costly (6x the cost of a normal HDD, expecially the RAM based ones), so it's not a viable solution right now.
<a href=http://www.runtime.org/>Getdataback</a>, seriously, its the best fucking program for recovery. I keep a copy available at all times. Usually what I do is make a complete drive dump and try to restore from that. If youre seriously concerned about the drive, to reduce further stress you can just do straight up recovery with the full version,
One of the HDDs on my previous computer died because of a black-out, and I've yet to recover the data that was on it. And this is why I bought an UPS after that.
In the future, if you have the hardware and financial resources I'd suggest setting up a RAID 1 configuration.
The only snag is the drive isn't basically reading anything at all right now. I can detect it correctly in BIOS so I know the drive controller is still working (unlike a previous HDD of mine). I'll give this app a shot though just to be on the safe side - fortunately there is nothing that's irreplacable on this disc. Just recovering data will save me redownloading about 200GB in TV rips =P And yeah, HDDs suck. I look forward to the day we're all running SSD drives =/
Western Digital are the only hard drives I trust now. Only one has crapped out on me, and I think it was because it had been sitting not being used for almost a year, if that even does anything.
The most obvious thing is freezing. I also suggest you boot from a live CD such as Knoppix or Bart's PE so that you don't have to strain the disk further with operating system stuff. I also reccomend Spinrite (http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm), if Leo Laporte says it's good that's good enough for me. I think it comes with Hiren's Boot CD.
It does. I have used Spinrite, and it's excellent. Hiren's Boot CD is like the most amazing thing, anyway.
I recommend you try a USB adapter for your drive, I have more luck with those than having them in the computer itself.
