Topic: Harddrive crash and recover

[twatts (pants are so over-rated...)]

OK, it seems we had a brown-out while we were gone for Thanksgiving and one of my externals decided that was a good time to give up the ghost...  Lost ~1.5tb of PH...  Sucks...  Its backed up for the most part in the fact the Jeff Mitchell has most everything, but I'd like to try and recover what's mine...

Any advice on how to recover a dead harddrive???  Its a Seagate External 2tb unit... 

Thanks!

Terry

[deadhoarse]

You could try taking the hard drive out of the enclosure, and plugging it directly into your computer to see if it works. It's possible that the brown-out only fried the external enclosure, not the drive itself (happened to a friend of mine just a few weeks back). Just a warning though, opening the enclosure will void the warranty.

[runonce]

Is the drive totally dead electronically - or just not recognizing?

Try it on a few different computers...

I have one HD that will only recognize on a Linux Mint 13 box...no other Windows or Linux will read it...(following similar power failure conditions.)

Might also suggest - unplug the power supply and the drive - disconnect all...and let it sit for a while. ..15 minutes or so.

If all else fails - agree with deadhorse - crack it open and attach it to the computer as secondary/slave drive.

[twatts (pants are so over-rated...)]

OK, after some reading on the interwebz and some experimenting, I think I've figured out that its the power supply...  When I switch power connections, it runs just fine.  And the worked-just-fine drive I put in it place now all-of-a-sudden doesn't work...  When I crawled under my desk and felt the PS's, two of the three were slightly warm, while the third was cold...  I think that confirms it for me...

Hopefully the IT guy at work has one laying around that I can have... 

Thanks for the suggestions and help!

Terry

[twatts (pants are so over-rated...)]

Got a new PS from the IT guy (he had about 20 different PS's in a box) and now the drive is back up and running...

Woohoo!!!  *knock on wood*

Terry

[keytohwy]

Now, go back up!

[adrianf74]

What keytohwy just said.

/ON SOAPBOX

Somebody at work once told me the following: if it's not backed up, it doesn't exist. 

Depending on the age of the drives, they may have S.M.A.R.T. monitoring at which point you REALLY SHOULD BE running something like HD Sentinel Pro.   Worth every dollar because it will tell me when a drive is starting to die giving me time to move the data elsewhere.  You can read more about this here: http://www.hdsentinel.com/

Another great application is something called disParity (freeware).  What I like about disParity is that you need one drive that's equal in size to the largest one in the group of drives you have and it'll use that drive to create a parity set of your data (essentially what PAR2 files do with RAR files for those people on usenet).  If you lose one drive, you can recreate the data on it from the parity set plus your other drives.  If you lose two drives or more, you're pooched.  But, since you're running HD Sentinel Pro, you'll know in advance, no?  Info on disParity can be found here: http://www.vilett.com/disParity/

So, that'll at least help you minimize the risk of data loss.  I still duplicate all of my masters and critical data (including both raw and processed) to portable hard drives that are kept off site.  If there's ever a fire and I lose the data on the main drives, I still have a copy of my personal stuff that can't be reacquired. 

Hopefully this helps some people out around here.  This concludes my Public Service Announcement. 

/OFF SOAPBOX

[Ultfris101]

Same thing happened to me once. I was bummed that i lost a drive and trying to figure out what to do. By chance tried a power supply from another identical drive and it worked.

For future reference, if a drive truly is dying but not all the way there yet you can sometimes get them to come back to life temporarily by putting them in the freezer for a while. A buddy at work had a drive with a bunch of media on it that he didn't have backed up because he could re-rip but it would be a pain. He did a couple cycles of freezing the drive and transferring data and got pretty much everything off of it.

On the backup front, I've been using Carbonite for a while and like the simplicity and little green dot on windows which tells me if a file is backed-up or not but the way they throttle uploads once your backup set gets big doesn't work for large media collections like I have (and presume many on this board do).

Crashplan doesn't seem to throttle, or at least not as much and I've been able to get more than a terabyte uploaded in just a few weeks. I'm planning to let my Carbonite subscription for at least my main audio/video workstation expire and move entirely to Crashplan for it. It will also back up external drives which carbonite will only do in limited situations.

I won't go so far as to say a file doesn't exist if it's not backed up because I can prove that wrong  , but I will say that if you aren't backing something up it must not be very important and clearly you'd be fine if you lost it forever because it's just a matter of time.

[stevetoney]

My personal masters (music, my austin city limits collection, stuff like that that can't be replaced) are backed up to redundant drives.

I didn't back up my Phish archive because, as you said, we've shared it amongst ourselves with enough people that I know it can be replaced.  I imagine most of you guys that have the full archive are like me in that you've kept it up-to-date with the latest shows...those that have occurred since the last show date on whatever version of the Phish archive you got. 

One of these days I'll probably cough up another $100 or whatever to redund-ify my phish, but haven't done it yet.