I'm really in a state of total shock right now.

I've NEVER had a HD crash before... EVER.

But my secondary HD of 80GB has crashed.

All my video projects, in progress and unfinished are inaccessible, perhaps lost forever.

Weed Killer Episode 2... SO F---ING close to completion... gone? I've been obsessing about finishing this... I can't believe it may be lost forever.

All those started and unfinished video projects.

All my personal data... photos... personal logs...

Made some phone calls, got my first quote on the cost of recovering the data. The company is called Drive Savers (www.drivesavers.com). The quote was upwards of $2,000.00. The cost could get as high as $4,000.00!!

I can't believe this is happening.

I really wish I were a painter right now... canvas cannot crash.

Yeah - I'm in a state of shock for sure. Even as I type this, I'm denying the possibility of total loss... which I know may indeed be the outcome.



What do you know?

Who's been through the process of data recovery before?

Should I remove the drive from my computer before it gets worse (if that's possible), or is it safe to let it sit inside for now?

The computer recognizes the drive as an unformatted drive and asks if I want to format it when I try to access it. Of course, I choose "no".

Yesterday, everything was normal.

Today, everything was normal, until I tried accessing 1 file on the drive.. then my computer was dogging as it kept having trouble reading the drive, so I rebooted. Then the drive did an error checking thing, and removed a directory that it could not read. A bummer, but not a very important directory. Then after rebooting, the drive was "unformatted".

I can't believe this is happening.

I can't believe how I feel right now.

I think I'd better go for a while.

Thank you for such a prompt response, redrain85.

I'm looking in to SpinRite v6 right now. Been reading up on it and trying to look for reviews.

It sounds very logical in what it does, and $90.00 is far better than potentially $4,000.00. But how reliable it is? I'm not asking you that, I'm only wondering that myself. $4K - how the hell can I afford that?

The process takes hours, even days to run.

I don't care if it took a month, so long as it recovered everything.

But, that's the thing. What if it can't recover much? What if it damages or looses other data while recovering what it can? What if that other data may have been recovered by a data recovery service? What if the world ended tomorrow. Guess it's useless to ask what if?

Man, my head is spinning faster than my dead HD.

So many things to ponder.

I can't believe I feel as if a close family has died.

Well, my children may as well have died. May sound dumb to some people, but my creations are my babies. I love them in ways that would sound stupid to many people.

Jeez, listen to me.

Not sure I should be communicating publicly right now. Still in shock.

Trust me so long as the hard drive can still spin and it's only a couple of tracks that needs to be swapped out onto another track. And its not the click of death which is even worst than what you had. Makes a guy like me after 15 turn white when I hear that. You'll be fine with some kind of software recovery for your drive so you can transfer it some where else. Until you can get the drive working.

TheReelTodd Wrote:Thank you for such a prompt response, redrain85. But, that's the thing. What if it can't recover much? What if it damages or looses other data while recovering what it can? What if that other data may have been recovered by a data recovery service? What if the world ended tomorrow. Guess it's useless to ask what if? Man, my head is spinning faster than my dead HD. So many things to ponder. I can't believe I feel as if a close family has died. Well, my children may as well have died. May sound dumb to some people, but my creations are my babies. I love them in ways that would sound stupid to many people. Jeez, listen to me. Not sure I should be communicating publicly right now. Still in shock.

Todd, maybe you already saw this . . . but I thought I would mention it anyway. Here's a video where the author of SpinRite talks about how the program works.

http://media.grc.com/sr6_with_leo.zip
He claims on the web site that it will keep reading over and over - thousands of times if need be - until it gets an error-free read, and then it writes the data back out. Only if after thousands of times it can't get a good read, then it will resort to reconstructing the data as best it can.

Of course, since he's the author, he would say that to sell his product. But appearing on a show like Call for Help with Leo Laporte does add some weight to the authenticity of his claims.

I would be so bummed if this happened to me. I totally understand where you're coming from, TheReelTodd, since I have a bunch of original artwork and other creative things I've done stored on my hard drive. And also many digital photos of family events, etc., that no one else has a copy of. Imagining all that hard work gone? No way. I'm really sorry, and I hope you're able to get the data back. I've pried open a hard drive before and the little mirrored hard drive discs look like something NASA would create. It's really amazing, actually. I find it hard to believe, after seeing what hard drives look like inside, that the data could be gone forever. How could it be gone? Surely it is or should be recoverable somehow, imo. But I'm not an expert.

If all the roads you go down lead to dead ends, TheReelTodd, maybe hold onto that hard drive for years to come, just in case. Just in case a new technology comes out 10 years from now that makes data recovery simple and reliable.

Wow. I should go save some files to disk now. *sigh*...

Man, that's really bad. For the sake of your amazing video projects, I hope you can get into it again.

I had a similar problem, but the process was much slower and I had time to boot with Knoppix (bootable Linux) and burn my stuff to CD before it all went (although a lot of files had already been damaged and wouldn't burn, I got most of it off). I then bought a new harddrive and transferred it, because the old one took (seriously) 13 hours to format, and at the very end, in true Windows fashion, gave me an error message.

By the sound of things, though, a bootable OS wouldn't work for you - my problem was that my Windows OS had been damaged, and so that was the only way I could access my data.

I really do hope you can get your stuff back though. I've got my fingers crossed.

TheReelTodd Wrote:Well, my children may as well have died. May sound dumb to some people, but my creations are my babies. I love them in ways that would sound stupid to many people.

Oh Todd I sure hope you are able to recover everything. Believe me I can certainly understand the love of your works. My TRON POV-Ray models I've spent so much time working on them over the years I'd be devastated if I lost them. In part that's why I'm sharing them here more and more often and emailing them to those that are interested. On top of that I have the files on 2 seperate PCs and I even carry them with me on my Jump Drive.
I realized that's much harder to do with 80GBs of data but its still possible. I myself have been looking into something like this:

http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=203021014&adid=17070&dcaid=17070
500GB for $170 sounds pretty good to me. I realize this doesn't help now but I'm hopefull some of the software the others are pointing out will help you revive your children again.

Good luck,
Carl
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If anything, to my understanding, some hard drives just give out... nothing to be really done about it.

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Todd, just wondering . . . was the hard drive making any unusual sounds, that you noticed? Any clicking sounds, or similar?

If there were, then that's a sign the drive is dying and any further use of the drive will cause more damage. In that case, a data recovery service would probably be your only option.

One way to find out if the hard drive is still okay, is to boot the computer and hit the Delete key to go into the BIOS. (Though some computers use a different key, like with Dell I think it's F1?) Then you would check the IDE information, and see if the BIOS can still properly detect the problem hard drive. The only problem with this is, if the HD is indeed dying, once again accessing the drive might cause more damage.

But I suspect this is a case of the file allocation table or other parts of the drive becoming corrupt, due to a crash or some other weirdness occuring in Windows. In that case, the drive should be able to be used without causing further damage. Though it still might be a good idea after recovering and backing up the data, to stop using the drive to store important data until you can determine whether it's still reliable.

As for contacting the hard drive manufacturer, typically they will simply send you a new hard drive - without offering to help recover your data. But, it's a good idea to explore all the options.

We're all rooting for you, Todd!