Help

[prof]

To all the computer wizards out there:

My goddamn harddrive has just crashed! Kaput! Nada! Nothing works! Piece of crap. Time to invest in cd burners.

What's the best way to retrieve data/files from the hard drive? Esp all those important pics.

Any help appreciated. It's worth a couple of free lap dances (not from me!) when I get back to T.O. this summer. Maybe at a TERB party in Aug if there is one.

 

[Cardinal Fang]

When that happened to me a couple of years back I was fortunate to have the IT geeks (no offense Goober) in my office look at it for me. They recovered about 30% of the information. The rest was too corrupted to be used.

Best of luck prof.....

 

[Kassidy]

Damn Computers

Well, I recently went through a similar problem, altough it was caused by a virus. Here's what I did (amazing most of all to me):

First you will have to get a new computer. Once you have this computer up and running, remove the hard drive from your old computer and set it up as a slave drive in the new one. Boot up the new computer nad wait until it recognizes the new hardware, then right click on your "My Computer" cion on your desktop and choose the explore option. Hopefully when you click on the new hard drive, probably the D drive, it will show your files. Copy and drag them to your new hard drive, try just taking the ones you NEED, as transferring everything may just transfer the problem. Then run a full system anti-virus scan. If any viruses are found great, That will probably solve your problem, and transfer away, but if not, forget the rest of the data, and just go with what you got. Remove the other drive, paint it a pretty colour and use it as a paper weight. Any other questions just PM me.

Emma

 

[eyeofthedragon]

ouch - prof if it was a hard drive failure (fatal disk error) it can be very difficult and expensive to recover the data - I had a similar problem several years ago and lost everything - I learned a valuable lesson - You cant go foward until you BACK UP

 

[Cruise]

To eyeofthedragon:

holly crap. thats scary shit. i work in IT. man if that happen to me, i be freak out. i think the lesson of this class is learn to back da data up.

most hard drive can last 10 year under normal situation. and I wonder how u use ur computer? did u use it on 24/7?
thats why

 

[xarir]

Emma's solution might work best for you prof. Another thing to try if it doesn't is to take your (presumably PC-based) HD and stick it into another platform. I once had luck putting a Macintosh HD in a Sun box then copying files to another drive. You might be able to take your PC drive and stick it in say, a Mac and still having files copied.

This method does tend to garble the data, but you could get lucky and get most of it intact. (I did.)

On this topic, what's the best way you guys have to back up? I'd like to use a tape drive but I'm not willing to spend $1000+ on the drive. A DVD only holds 4.7GB of data so that doesn't cut the mustard for me.

 

[Kassidy]

Back ups

I have a cd burner, and burn all essential data files, for work (I am also Director of Research and Marketing for a group of authors). Windows Xp Professional, my OS, creates a restore point each time I close down. So I can get the system running no problem, and then I just reload what I need, and off I go.

Emma

 

[Speedo]

I have an external Maxtor hard drive that I use for back-up only. Easy to transfer files, and the drive itself is portable.

And I burn the most essential files on a CD as a second back-up...

I sound brilliant, eh? Right. I only took these steps after a complete drive failure a couple of years ago...

Good luck, Prof. Hopefully it's "just" a mild virus and your files can be recovered...

 

[papasmerf]

Send the drive to Western Digital and have them recover it for you. They are the folks who do it for agencies like the FBI and police departments all over the world. They make then and can do more for you then anyone can.