hard drive death

hawken · Sep 2006

hi

my external USB HDD has died after 3 years of loyal service. Only thing is, I was using it as my backup so I've kinda lost everything from the past 8 years. (all my DVD's were lost in the move to Japan)

I was wondering if anyone has ever had this error:

<font color="red"> Unable to read FAT (Input/output error) </font>

and if so, were you able to fix it?

ScoobyDoofus · Sep 2006

Well, I did a lot of investigating recently and if the HD is spinning up and can be seen by the Bios, then chances are some recovery program may be able to read all the data off it by sectors, ignoring the Fila Allocation Table (read the book without the table of contents basically) and recover a pretty large percentage of your data depending on the type of failure. If the drive does not spin up, or operate, you'll need to send it in for data recovery which will cost between 800-4,000$USD (at least, those are the kinds of estimates I got for my failed disk)

hawken · Sep 2006

I got some kinda success. I read that mac is shit at reading FAT so I run some recovery software under windows and it could read the drive apart from 3 or 4 damaged sectors. I guess the next step it to find something I can put 250 gigs of data on.

and fuck apple for releasing the 24 inch mac three weeks after I got my 20 inch mac.

bearkub · Sep 2006

holy cow, Scoobs! do you mind mentioning who you got those quotes from?

Sorry aboot yer drive, hawken. can't you just go trade up on your mac? =]

adam · Sep 2006

Scoobs, then me.. and now you - we're all getting hard disk failures! Which reminds me, I have to send off my proof of purchase to get an RMA and return that faulty bitch.

Eric Chadwick · Sep 2006

I was just reading about portable RAID drives in Wired the other day. Each holds a terabyte. Not cheap though, anywhere from 2K-700 $US. They're looking pretty good to me right now though.

SHEPEIRO · Sep 2006

just a thought from another thread, but go to a butchers and hook it up to a sheeps brain should store it.

im sure they do real fresh sheeps brain in Japan

oXYnary · Sep 2006

[ QUOTE ]
Scoobs, then me.. and now you - we're all getting hard disk failures! Which reminds me, I have to send off my proof of purchase to get an RMA and return that faulty bitch.

[/ QUOTE ]

Me also back in Mayish.

Joshua Stubbles · Sep 2006

One of the western digital HDDs I bought for my new rig was DOA. Had to RMA back to Newegg for a placement. The new one was fine and dandy. Got my 500gb sata2 Raid0 up and running smooth now

I suffered the same fate a few years ago, Hawken. Lost 5+ years of work

Sorry to hear of your misfortune.

Scooby is right on target with the data recovery prices, though. Considering that most of it can be done with cheap software, I have NO IDEA why these places charge so much. Getting data off a jacked HDD here in Reno is a minimum of $1000. Rip off.

Eric Chadwick · Sep 2006

Huh, I mis-remembered the prices. $1200-800.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/play.html?pg=13

ScoobyDoofus · Sep 2006

Vassago: The reason its so expensive is because if there is a mechanical failure with the disk, they may have to remove the magnetic platters from your disk and put them into a special universal size reader designed to scan any size & type of platter. They have to invest in these things & custom software, experts, etc make it happen.

KDR_11k · Sep 2006

I've just replaced an IBM Deathstar drive that was closing in on a drive failure. It often made a BIP-click-clack-BIP noise, usually it did that once a day at most, recently it's been doing that constantly and sometimes causing BSODs. Does anyone know what that noise is?

pyromania · Sep 2006

[ QUOTE ]
I've just replaced an IBM Deathstar drive that was closing in on a drive failure. It often made a BIP-click-clack-BIP noise, usually it did that once a day at most, recently it's been doing that constantly and sometimes causing BSODs. Does anyone know what that noise is?

[/ QUOTE ]

It's the hard drive head falling down onto the spinning platter and skipping off to the edge. Deathstars where notorious for that problem and the noise became known as the "click of death"

KDR_11k · Sep 2006

Interesting, you'd think that'd cause data loss but all data on the thing seemed to be fine. Letting it cool down reduced the frequency a lot (won't happen for a few hours) but if it got too worked up it caused a BSOD.

Downsizer · Sep 2006

http://www.dposoft.net/ if it's bad sectors..

Sounds like the tables are fucked up, partition data is probably the cause, bad sectors would do that. Grab a boot disc or cd with chkdsk on it, since it's FAT formatted you wont need ntfs dos support, run 'CHKDSK /R' and wait. That will flag bad sectors and move data to good ones. Try to get the data off after that. Use an xcopy to grab the files, use the switches to not halt the operation on errors and it will pull everything it can, and ignore the rest.

IF the drive is mechanically failing, 95% of the time your MAC would prompt you in post with a s.m.a.r.t. error number. Most severe mechanical problems with HD's are also audible. PM me if you need anything else I guess.

hard drive death

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