Don't die on me, PC!

[Fri]

But yeah, after much begging and heartwrenching scene in front of the emergency room, the surgeon, er, technician said that he's unable to save the hard drive. Along with five years worth of picture, article, work, and save game...

This time the power of love and friendship can't save him.

Sigh. I spent the next day trying to salvage the data, but most of them are unsalvageable. I can get another hard drive, but it won't be the same dammit! Our adventure together, the time we spent ogling at pretty girls... And freakin lot of un-backup-ed works...

Anyone got similar experience?

[Kcalehc]

A friend of mine lost a hard drive, it just died on him all of a sudden. (this was about 11 years ago, when they were still pretty expensive)

In its memory we played baseball. With the hard drive as the ball and a claw hammer as the bat. It took a while to break apart, but we enjoyed ourselves ;)

I myself have lost several hard drives too, theres still 2 on my SCSI cable that are dead. I pulled the power and they sit there now, ghosts inside the case - doing nothing more than taking up space.

[Magnor Criol]

My deepest condolences, that doth suck royally. I know that for me, my laptop & external HD are two of my most prized possessions, simply because it contains so many of my creations, my brainchildren, and I'd hate to lose all that.


Anyone got similar experience?

My cat peed on my laptop.

No, seriously. Don't know when exactly it was, but right before I went off to work at the camp in West Texas where I slave away cheerfully spend my summer =p , my laptop just started to stop working. As in, without warning it would just power off - not shut down, power off, and often it would take two, three, four tries just to get it to turn on again for a few minutes at most.

So I leave it in the capable hands of a friend's father who runs a computer business out of his home and leave for the summer. A week after I get to camp, I call back home to see what's up, and the technician said that he can tell that something peed on the laptop, and the acid leaked down and began to ruin the mechanical and electronic parts inside.

He couldn't tell exactly what it was, but only my cat had the opportunity and ability to do so. Also, as a cat, he's get an inherently evil side to him, so there's that.

Thankfully, though - unlike your story - my hard drive wasn't hurt. He burned my My Documents and my music folder to DVDs for me. And all my games I keep on an external hard drive so that I can (theoretically) focus on schoolwork when I need to by disconnecting the drive, so I didn't lose any game data except my N games.

[liuzg150181]

But yeah, after much begging and heartwrenching scene in front of the emergency room, the surgeon, er, technician said that he's unable to save the hard drive. Along with five years worth of picture, article, work, and save game...

This time the power of love and friendship can't save him.

Sigh. I spent the next day trying to salvage the data, but most of them are unsalvageable. I can get another hard drive, but it won't be the same dammit! Our adventure together, the time we spent ogling at pretty girls... And freakin lot of un-backup-ed works...

Anyone got similar experience?
My condolence, I feel your pain as I had experienced it before,though all that matters in the harddisk are the saved game files and some internet links~~~
Anyway AFAIK the lifespan of harddisks are usually 5 yrs,also true professional HD retrieval(those in-lab types,not technicians) actually costs a few hundred bucks,at least in my country.:smalleek:

[JaxGaret]

You can send it to a data recovery service, if there's important data you need.

It'll be at least a couple hundred bucks, though.

[valadil]

My RAID5 died. For those not familiar, a RAID is a redundant array of inexpensive disks. Through math that I don't want to bore you with (wikipedia it if you like) a level 5 RAID lets you store n-1 disks worth of data on n disks such that any one disk can die and no data will be lost. If two disks die at once you're boned, but just one can die and in theory you're okay.

Note the part about "in theory you're okay." I had a 4 400GB disks. I was using 3 of those for 1.2TB of data. A drive died, but for whatever reason it wasn't detected as dead, so its corrupted bits spread to the other drives. I spent about a week trying to get data back before giving up and starting over.

[rayne_dragon]

My room-mate's sort of girlfriend spilled water on my last lap-top. It completely ruined the hard drive to the point that I couldn't recover anything from it. The worst part is because of financial reasons I had to switch back to a PC from a Mac that I'd grown quite fond of.

[EmeraldRose]

We had a hard drive get corrupted by the video card we bought for it a few years ago. Lost everything. Still couldn't play my game for which we'd bought the video card....

We were overseas, so it was horribly expensive to replace all the stuffs. :smallyuk:

[SMEE]

But yeah, after much begging and heartwrenching scene in front of the emergency room, the surgeon, er, technician said that he's unable to save the hard drive. Along with five years worth of picture, article, work, and save game...

This time the power of love and friendship can't save him.

Sigh. I spent the next day trying to salvage the data, but most of them are unsalvageable. I can get another hard drive, but it won't be the same dammit! Our adventure together, the time we spent ogling at pretty girls... And freakin lot of un-backup-ed works...

Anyone got similar experience?

This may sound silly, but I salvaged much data for my friends with this.
Put it in a ziplock bag and take it to the freezer. Let it freeze for a few hours.
Plug it, copy as much data as you can before it heats up, rinse and repeat.

[Fri]

For real? Huh... never heard that technique before...

[IsaacTheHungry]

This may sound silly, but I salvaged much data for my friends with this.
Put it in a ziplock bag and take it to the freezer. Let it freeze for a few hours.
Plug it, copy as much data as you can before it heats up, rinse and repeat.

I does sound silly but i have to admit i once used something like that. My laptop fried from overheating. i finaly recovered my music stored on it when i took it to my parents house. they like to keep the house's temp in the sixties and i found that if i let my laptop chill on a cold floor downstairs (were it can get even colder due to a renovation in progress) that i could turn it on and it would work fine until it heated up to a more normal temp. using this method i retrieved my data over a few nights.

depending on how it went bad cold could help