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Home > Archive > Hardware > August 2003 > ....and my C - Drive was History...
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....and my C - Drive was History...
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| Deja-vue 2003-08-08, 10:32 pm |
| This Morning, as usual, i fire up my Workstation, my favorite Machine, the Dual-Athlon Monster, and guess what?
All of a sudden, it started to reboot, just out of the blue, kept on re-starting, over and over again...
Pop in the WinXP-CD, you might think.
Yes, that is what i did.
Recovery-Console, you might say.
Did that one, too.
Nothing worked!
My Documents, my Websites, my Pictures, oh my!!!
42 Gigs of Stuff gone? (I had 2 120 gig hard drives on it.)
Relax, I tell myself... I have done this a million times before.
"Repair Windows" flashes into my tired Brain (after all, it is 7:00 AM in the Morning.
Booted into the CD, repair, recover, Emergency Repair, nothing worked.
“Drive C is unrecognized or damaged", it says. (116000 MB free) ???
I restrain myself from walking back into the House ( my lab is in the Garage) and beat up my Wife or at least the Cats...no, can't do that.
Ah, I think, the Winternals CD in my Car ( never leave Home without it) will help me...
Sure enough, boot into the Winternals recovery CD, and ...nothing.
Corrupted Partition or damaged Drive, it tells me.
So i pull the Drives out, install a fresh 120 gig Drive, load Windows.
Load Drivers.
Damn ATI Card.
Damn G-Force Card.
Damn Raid Controller.
Damn Audigy Card.
Load all Updates, close to 100 Megs. ( without Service pack 1, I got that on my Server)
Load Office.
Load FrontPage.
load ...where’s my Battlefield 1942 CD???
Rewind 4 Days
Perhaps it has something to do with it, i just installed my brand new Board in this Machine, now using a Gigabyte instead a Tyan, sold that with the CPU's. The Thing ran like a Charm, Games looked awesome, but something must have happened.
I took the 2 Drives, obviously damaged,( can't believe it)and connected them to one of my Motherboards, slaved them to an existing System, Windows did a repair ( will post the Screenshot later)and woila', everything is there.
Now I just have to move all the Stuff from the Drives to the freshly installed Machine.
Meanwhile, Windows and Office is nagging me about the stupid activation.
I have some Backups from last week, heck I got a Server with almost a Terabyte Space on it, even got some Ghost-Images from way back in April 2003, but decided to go all fresh install.
Thank god, I backed everything up on my Server as well as on a removable Hard drive.
( USB 2.0, 250 gig)
What are we learning from that?
BACKUP EVERYTHING NOW!!! because it can happen to you.
Sorry about the long Story, but I just had to vent.
It will still take me a couple of Days to get the Machine back the Way I had it before.
I would not know, what I’d do without Backup.
Good Weekend to ya’ all! | |
| Deja-vue 2003-08-08, 10:35 pm |
| ....after i connected the "damaged Drives" to a Testbench Motherboard:
Any ideas? | |
| azimuth40 2003-08-09, 12:31 am |
| Well that sucks really bad.
one drive yes, two drives no. In no particular order, motherboard disk controller, bad cable, directory cache, one of your CPU's is not mod'ed as well as you had hoped.  equally  | |
| Boulware5 2003-08-09, 12:43 am |
| Backing up is so so so important. I think almost all of us can come up with a PC horror story that wouldn't have been so bad had we backed up. | |
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| Glad you backed up well. I keep a 120Gb hard drive solely for backups and every so often make a ghost on CDR just to be certain ... lol | |
| vincentnl 2003-08-09, 8:35 am |
| quote:
Originally posted by Boulware5
Backing up is so so so important. I think almost all of us can come up with a PC horror story that wouldn't have been so bad had we backed up.
Damn right there.
It's either that or you remember the site you got your download from if you don't have a re-writer like me until recently... | |
| Deja-vue 2003-08-09, 3:03 pm |
| Turns out both Drives are just fine.( only 2 months old.)Windows or Norton can't find any problems with them... also did a complete Virus-scan...nothing.
I still don't know, what exactly went wrong.
quote:
In no particular order, motherboard disk controller, bad cable, directory cache, one of your CPU's is not mod'ed as well as you had hoped
The dual MP's ( Former XP's) were checked for about 6 hours at maximum load, performed just fine.
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| oddduck 2003-08-09, 4:40 pm |
| Hum, That story sounds similar to mine, luckly it was just an 80. Computer did the whole rebooting over and over. When I found out what was wrong with it my harddrive had gone from ntfs to raw. I was still able to recover about 90% of my stuff so it didn't really bother me, and just reinstalled. Ahh No biggy, I think mine was caused by a power outage (crappy breaker is always blowing). I actuall was pretty sure my 80 had shit out on me (it does have bad secots and my heads crash more often then not). But it didn't, I don't think it will ever give me an excuse to replace it. Ah well, 'tis life, always tormented by things we can't control. | |
| ruscorp 2003-08-10, 8:10 pm |
| Sorry to hear. I lost 80 gigs at work in June due to a hdd failure. Same BoS. | |
| luisjo 2003-08-11, 1:54 am |
| Can anyone refer me to a good book or a website or anything to learn hard drive repair and data recovery, i have some cash to invest and in my country and some near by countries theres no service for that.
Help im desperate to do these data recovery company.
thanks guys.
Luisjo | |
| Boulware5 2003-08-11, 2:08 am |
| quote:
Originally posted by luisjo
Can anyone refer me to a good book or a website or anything to learn hard drive repair and data recovery, i have some cash to invest and in my country and some near by countries theres no service for that.
Help im desperate to do these data recovery company.
thanks guys.
Luisjo
You mean something like this ?
That's more for recovery of data if your drive catches on fire or gets thrown into a pool, though. | |
| luisjo 2003-08-11, 2:11 am |
| Yeap, but nobody tells me what to do, where to go and learn, i could send a couple of guys to get training over the US, but where to? what book do i have to get to get them started? | |
| azimuth40 2003-08-11, 1:04 pm |
| quote:
Originally posted by luisjo
Can anyone refer me to a good book or a website or anything to learn hard drive repair and data recovery, i have some cash to invest and in my country and some near by countries theres no service for that.
Help im desperate to do these data recovery company.
thanks guys.
Luisjo
Disk repair is not something the you branch into lightly. Notice first that most companies are data recovery only. Disk repair is really a dying field, disks are too cheap and you are compeating with the original equipment manufacturer, segate, WD, Maxtor, Mitsubisi etc.
There is also the very large money cost of a class A clean room. The particles in cigarette smoke are large enough to crash a disk head. Short of that you need a "clean box", a large glass container with a 1 micron purge unit as a cheaper option but still very very expensive. After that there are the certifing equipment and testers to obtain, more very expensive hardware.
You don't see information on how to get into the business because most already there are ex-disk drive maker employee's. I had a friend that used to do it and it really is an insiders field. Your return on investment would probably be a long time coming. | |
| luisjo 2003-08-11, 1:51 pm |
| Maybe i express myself wrongly, what i want to do is data recovery, disk repair as you said is a dying business, so what do you recomend i do, like buy an specialize software? or something? | |
| azimuth40 2003-08-11, 4:53 pm |
| quote:
Originally posted by luisjo
Maybe i express myself wrongly, what i want to do is data recovery, disk repair as you said is a dying business, so what do you recomend i do, like buy an specialize software? or something?
Unfortunately you pretty much need the same equipment. Normally you replace the circuit board with a known good one. After that you have to crack open the disk, check for a physical head crash. Normally that needs to be in a positive flow chamber, i.e. clean room or second best purge after checking things. If you have bad bearings then you remove the platters and place them on a new spindle and motor assembly.
So you see if you are doing data recovery, partial drive repair is required at least to the point of good heads, mechanics and electronics. Thats why most repair houses start at 4 figures and go up in cost from there. Those charges are also why most people have to be extremely desparate to use them.
OnTrack systems does sell software for first level attempts. Try here and see how they approach it, you may to get some ideas.
http://www.ontrack.com/datarecovery/helpwizard.asp | |
| sukuvi 2003-08-12, 1:44 am |
| Luisjo,
I'm not sure I understand your question. Do you have a bad disk of which you are trying to recover the data or you'd like to start a data recovery business? | |
| StevoC 2003-08-13, 10:21 am |
| Just out of curiosity, did anyone try an fdisk /mbr? I am wondering if it would have worked in your cases. Also, could any of you possibly had the msblaster trojan? (just asking because of the constant reboots...or are you not even able to get to windows?) | |
| vincentnl 2003-08-13, 12:33 pm |
| quote:
Originally posted by StevoC
Just out of curiosity, did anyone try an fdisk /mbr? I am wondering if it would have worked in your cases. Also, could any of you possibly had the msblaster trojan? (just asking because of the constant reboots...or are you not even able to get to windows?)
That msblaster stuff is what I am replying to.
You need minimal of service pack 2 if, like me, you have W2K. I tried downloading that patch and got that message. I don't like hotfixes. They mess up your systems and I was glad my pc rejected the protection. I've tried hotfixes before. You only learn by playfullness... | |
| JeremyWatts 2003-08-21, 9:16 pm |
| This is the exact reason my files go to a DAT backup then I back up to Several Zip disk then back to cdr's and then over to the 120 gig and the boot sytems is raid 0+1 yes lots of data archiving my church material is on here and so is my music and favorites | |
| Tarzanboy 2003-08-21, 9:33 pm |
| Deja, I had that happen 3 times, twice with bad PSUs (1 of those 2 failures fried both drives in the system) and once through a power surge/blackout.
Cheers,
TB | |
| Deja-vue 2003-08-26, 10:08 pm |
| quote:
Originally posted by Tarzanboy
Deja, I had that happen 3 times, twice with bad PSUs (1 of those 2 failures fried both drives in the system) and once through a power surge/blackout.
Cheers,
TB
Tarzan, it is a 550 Watt Antec Powersupply, that i bought not too long ago.
After extensive testing, i re-formatted the Drives and using them now again.
I am pushing large Videofiles ( 5 Gigs) back and forth between them right now to see, if they would hold up.
Sisoft Sandra reports nice transfer-speeds, and i think, it was a software-related issue.
Perhaps the motherboard-switch between Tyan and Gigabyte did it.
But then, a clean, fresh install never hurt.
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