Arg!!
100!
Yes, this is the 100th post to Keacher.com.
One hundred also represents the size, in gigabytes, of the Western Digital hard drive that I had fail tonight. I turned my desktop computer on and noticed that it was seeing my 100GB drive as either an 8.4GB drive or no drive at all. Either way, the computer wasn’t making it into Windows and instead was booting off a secondary hard drive into Linux. Curious as to what demons had befouled my computer, I cracked open the case. Sure enough, the 100GB drive was making not a sound.
I tried various cables, various connectors, various power sources, all to no avail; the drive remained lifeless, refusing to spin up. The drive is still under warranty, so I can easily have it replaced. Nonetheless, I am a bit annoyed at having lost roughly 60GB of data spanning the better part of five years. I have backups of my important data, but unfortunately that represents only a tiny subset of the whole.
I guess I’ve been lucky: this is the first hard drive that I have owned which physically failed. Granted, I have seen a LOT of dead Quantum drives, but they were all owned by my school district. Remember kids: backup, backup, backup!
File recovery efforts will continue once I return to Rose, where I have sufficient, reliable storage space on my RAID-1 Linux box to house any salvaged data. Rumor has it that freezing the failed drive in the freezer overnight might bring it back to life long enough to perform recovery. If anybody has any better ideas, I’d love to hear them!
Next major purchase: RAID controller for my Windows desktop box plus a bunch of hard drives…
Upon closer inspection, it turns out that 3GB of photos are among the data in limbo. One of the pitfalls of digital photography, I guess.
you can flip to the back of a computer magazine and send it to one of those places where it shoes the guys in the white clean room suits opening up hdds and having them get your data out. shultz told me they did it for his dad’s hdd and it cost 1800$ ouch.
raid-1 (mirroring) is my personal habit when it comes to all that shit you cant bare to throw away but never look at. being a digital packrat is much easier than being a real life packrat, i’m finding…
Yikes! Yeah, that’s a little too expensive for me. I admit it: I too am a digital packrat. It’s odd though, because I can’t stand real-life junk and clutter. In the digital realm, everything is different. If I need to see a message I received in April of 1999, by golly, I can see that message with just a couple of clicks. Guilt-free.
I think I found the cause of the failure, though not before it ate another one of my hard drives, an 8.4 GB Maxtor. I turned on my desktop computer again today to see if the problem had fixed itself. Unfortunately, I was greeted with anger. Seconds after I turned the computer on, sparks flew out from behind the computer, the system went dead, and a heavy scent of smoke was on the air. It appears that a bad power supply either a) was caused by the bad WD hard drive or b) caused the hard drive failures. Interestingly, the internal fuse in the power supply did not blow.
As far as computers go, this week could be better…
Mmmmmm…. RAID-1… I completely forgot I’m running that. Unfortuntely, I have been in the misfortunate position where my hard drives have failed… damn IBM Deskstar 45XGPs. Two of them have died — TWO!!!
If looking for a new hard drive, make sure to check out http://www.storagereview.com/ It’s a great site for finding that perfect drive.
Yeah, those deskstars were so bad IBM pulled out of the buisness.
And ah Jeff, too bad everyone doesn’t use a fireball, we could be over our heads in job offers right now!
I just had my second 60GB IBM drive fail on me.. this time I lost everything. Misery loves company…
I figured out how your blogroll is sorted… it’s based on last refer. Cute.
That’s how bored I am work.
I feel for you, Jeff. I somewhow ‘lost’ my windows directory a couple weeks ago. Most of my Bonneville stuff was stored in folders on the desktop….part of windows, of course. I’m recovering the bulk of it from those I sent copies to. Good luck to you.