SATA HDD Failure... and its art freeze today...

Mark Dygert

So I flipped on my new work machine, (its about 3mo old so I guess I can stop calling it that) and I get a nice little message "Failed to find bootable drive bla bla bla". Top it off is art freeze today.

When I left yesterday it was copying files to the server, then set to render about 10,000 frames of animation. Hopefully they all made it to the server and all I need to do is render, provided our IT guy comes in at a decent hour. Good thing I showed up early today ha! Oh well guess I'll go work out and maybe take a nap...

IronHawk

Thats harsh dude. Drives will usually either fail in the first 3 months or make it 3 years and then start to fail. Read some white papers on the topic recently.

Did you try reseating the cables? only about a 10% chance of it working but with a newer rig it happens more often.

rolfness

ouchy hope you're stuffs ok

Fliff

uuuh bad, sounds like you've got the files on to the server but the animation is gone

well good luck on that anyway, i guess you'll keep us updated

PolyHertz

First time I read the thought it said "So I flipped out on my new work machine..."

Is the hdd showing up in bios? Also, in the off chance you still use a floppy drive (less then 1% chance I'd imagine) make sure you don't have one in it.

sonic

If you really need the stuff, throw the drive in a zip lock bag and tape the top after you shut it. Throw it in the freezer for a few hours and take it out and plug it right in. It works fairly often

System

Hopefully the data should be okay, usually when drives fail it is mechanical or electrical. I would get that disc spinning and retrieve the info if it's valuable:poly108:

Psyk0

I had a drive fail on me last month, old piece of crap tho. Turns out the first sectors were dead so the drive appeared unformatted/missing when booting. I used a tool called file scavenger (not free tho), after scanning for 11hrs i could see the files on the disk and saved 5GB of data, of course the only file i was looking for was corrupted...stupid computers XD.

notman

yeah, the boot sector can get corrupted, which can easily be fixed with the fixboot command.
Of course, your harddrive controller could have died, which means the data is recoverable, but not easily.... or a cable worked its way loose... or the bios got a hair up it's ass...

either way, your data is probably safe, just accessing it is the problem. You could always download an Ubuntu LiveCD and boot from it to see if the drive data can be accessed. Hopefully you have IT people that are already working on it though

SideEffect

sonic wrote: »

If you really need the stuff, throw the drive in a zip lock bag and tape the top after you shut it. Throw it in the freezer for a few hours and take it out and plug it right in. It works fairly often

This will seriously work if something is cracked inside the hard drive. I was skeptical when I first read about it but figured it couldn't hurt to try. Amazingly it worked and gave me 20 minutes to get my files off of the hard drive. Most awesome trick I've ever seen.

sonic

Haha, yeah. Often something will get stuck and the contraction + expansion due to freezing and immediately reheating causes it to work temporarily.

AniMaShun

if it wont boot, you can try slaving that drive to another HDD that can boot, then try and navigate to the data that way. a bonus is that you will be set up to quickly grab the data onto a solid drive if you can see it.

Good Luck Vig, sorry to hear that.

Mark Dygert

Thanks guys

Update:
The day from hell... Our IT guy had a dentist app in the morning and he thought he would make it in but ended up calling in and not making it in.

So his boss and I did our own trouble shooting we tried it in a few machines in every conceivable configuration and it was never picked up by the bios.

We called the place that put it together on the off chance they could help and they said it was under warranty and that we should send it in and they could try to recover the data and if need be replace it. Which is great... but they won't replace it without first looking at it. The earliest they can look at it will be late next week or the week after that, if we want to pay extra they'll rush it.

Thats when I said, nothings going to happen today, have a nice weekend guys, I'll be in tomorrow to get some work done on an open machine. When I left they where going to buy a new HD and try to get it working by tomorrow. I still have a metric ton of software, plug-ins and licenses that need to be somehow magically transferred. It was a bit of a pain transferring licenses when it was upgraded, with the exception of PuppetShop, why can't they all be that easy?

So it had its craptastic moments but I got off early, only to have to work another Saturday, worked both days last week. Its a damn good thing theres 2 weeks of down time till the next project where all I have to do is fix minor bugs and gear up for the next game, going to be great, provided it doesn't eat another HD.

Seagate SATA 7200 RPM, the replacement will be a redundant raid... lets see two of them fail back to back!

IronHawk

I Raid.