Aww... 250GB hard drive went poof :\

[GexX2]

I was defragging. And bored. So I brought up winamp. All of a sudden, winamp and PerfectDisk froze. And I had to reboot my comp. and alas, my entire cmos went loony, and I had to clear it, and even then, the E drive is recognized, but doesn't show up in windows.... AT ALL :\ So I'm going to try to format it, but bye bye to all my games, and nds backups, and my proud collection of PS1 classic s D: (36gbs worth

) Anyone else had a similar experience?

 

[mthrnite]

Nope, never had that precise pleasure, but if I did, I might try a Linux boot CD to hunt my files down and transfer them to another drive before I formatted. I mean even if there's a 1% chance everything ain't skarood, it might be worth the try.

Thereagain, I might wait a bit and see if somebody who knows what they're talking about chimes in.

(I'd just hate to see all that neet stuff blow away!)

 

[GexX2]

ah, good plan. I have my linspire disc at the ready

 

[Firon]

Don't format it!
Try GetDataBack NTFS Pro on the disk first, or Acronis RecoveryExpert.

Generally I'd say to use Testdisk first to recover the partition, but since it froze, it's probably a more serious problem than just the partition table getting corrupted.

 

[Opium]

I was defragging. And bored. So I brought up winamp. All of a sudden, winamp and PerfectDisk froze. And I had to reboot my comp. and alas, my entire cmos went loony, and I had to clear it, and even then, the E drive is recognized, but doesn't show up in windows.... AT ALL :\ So I'm going to try to format it, but bye bye to all my games, and nds backups, and my proud collection of PS1 classic s D: (36gbs worth

) Anyone else had a similar experience?

Actually yeah pretty much same thing happened to me. However my harddrive actually had a hardware crash, it didn't work anymore what so ever. Now I use it as my doorstop.

Consider yourself lucky, my harddrive had all my pc games, saves, downloads and........Windows

 

[kingeightsix]

i used diskeeper pro... it defrags for me on the fly.... should i stop using it now? i'm getting paranoid coz my computer right now is pretty much my life... i can't leave the house and i don't like tv...

 

[GexX2]

Oh damn. Opium, I have your problem methinks. I now have a 250gb doorstop. Maxtors Powermax tools says the drive has failed and has 0 bytes available... >.> So my drive is dead. I'm guessing its the maxtor firmware corruption issue. :\ I'd RMA it, but this is a refurbed drive. yay. Now I have to buy a new one D:

Edit- Looked at Pricegrabber, and since I've heard nothing but immense praise for WD, What do you all think of this? its normall $190+
so its a fantastic deal, and itr has a year warranty

I think I may buy 2 and go to half a terrabyte, since my main hard drive is an ancient 20gb Quantum Fireball, lol.

 

[cenotaph]

Oh damn. Opium, I have your problem methinks. I now have a 250gb doorstop. Maxtors Powermax tools says the drive has failed and has 0 bytes available... >.> So my drive is dead. I'm guessing its the maxtor firmware corruption issue. :\ I'd RMA it, but this is a refurbed drive. yay. Now I have to buy a new one D:

Edit- Looked at Pricegrabber, and since I've heard nothing but immense praise for WD, What do you all think of this? its normall $190+
so its a fantastic deal, and itr has a year warranty

I think I may buy 2 and go to half a terrabyte, since my main hard drive is an ancient 20gb Quantum Fireball, lol.

Maxtor. Says it all. In my experience, Maxtor has the highest failure rate of all hdd brands. I've got four-five dead Maxtors over here (and two dead Seagates, one dead IBM etc.). Mind you, these have all been in a box where hdd temperature is around ~35C average, so I wouldn't say they've been running too hot.

 

[tama_mog]

Actually, from personal experience, I've always had good luck with maxtors though my props really goes to seagate for making amazing drives....silent, dependable, and quick....nothing much more you can ask for. I don't think I've ever had a WD drive that I haven't RMAed 2 times or more. This is why RAID exists people, it really is a good idea.

 

[Smuff]

Yeah, similar story here.....
40Gig of Saturn backups down the twitter

Have now invested in an external HD (320Gig) that only gets used once a month or so to backup important stuff I don't wanna lose if my day-to-day HD packs up (Like my Saturn stuff again, and my DS lovelies

)

 

[Gabi]

Use "Recover My Files", J have the same experience, J format and defragment it and J could recover ALL

 

[ShadowXP]

Use "Recover My Files", J have the same experience, J format and defragment it and J could recover ALL

J is one LUCKY man!

I have a 4-5 year old Maxtor 40GB and just under a year old Maxtor 200GB... both are still running perfectly.

 

[754boy]

i used diskeeper pro... it defrags for me on the fly.... should i stop using it now? i'm getting paranoid coz my computer right now is pretty much my life... i can't leave the house and i don't like tv...

Diskeeper pro is the shit. I been using it for over a year and none of my drives have been harmed. Plus its fast as hell.

 

[Hitto]

I once had a disk die on me, after two years of loyal service. Everything on it, poof, gone.

I would have been mad with rage if I didn't have a backup disk.

Ultimately, don't trust software of any kind to magically protect what is essentially a piece of metal that spins at high-speed. I've had disks that survived power shortages while they were formatted, and disks that died because partitionmagic felt like fucking them up. The only, really sensible way to keep tabs is having physical backups ready.

 

[cenotaph]

One word:

RAID.

 

[Psyfira]

Why on earth would anyone run programs while defragging?!

Sympathise with the hard disk woes; my laptop's been randomly freezing for about 2 years now. Because it's random it's taken me ages to work out what the problem was but latest theory is that the Hitachi Laptop drive's a bit dodgy. I do a full backup about once every 6 months, probably should do it a bit more often in case it completely dies on me.

cenotaph: Depends if it's worth it or not. Having a duplicate 250GB hard disk is a dead expensive way of backing up (unless you had a spare one laying around the house anyway)

 

[adgloride]

You should be able to recover the disc. I can remember messing about with mine when for some reason I installed windows xp on both drives. I got fed up of it asking me to select which windows to start so I was messing about and for some reason deleted the partition. I managed to buy a program to get it all back luckly (Can't remember its name).

I'd lost 200gb of stuff if I couldn't recover it. A few months later the harddrive broke all together, it started clicking. Luckly I managed to transfer all the data over to an external before it went too bad. The best harddrive I've had is the Western Digital I got when I bought my dell. Its only 80gb and I've considered getting rid of it a few times, but after 5 years its still going strong so theirs no need to upgrade it to a bigger one.

 

[KeitaroBaka]

I had around 30 gigs of mp3 and all my roms on a 80go maxtor. It died after 3 months. Now I only trust Western Digital : never had a problem and my 160 go has been working since 2 years 24/7. I just bought an external 250go WD and it's also perfect.

Western Digital is the best in my opinion !

 

[GexX2]

1. Why on earth would anyone run programs while defragging?!

Sympathise with the hard disk woes; my laptop's been randomly freezing for about 2 years now. Because it's random it's taken me ages to work out what the problem was but latest theory is that the Hitachi Laptop drive's a bit dodgy. I do a full backup about once every 6 months, probably should do it a bit more often in case it completely dies on me.

2. cenotaph: Depends if it's worth it or not. Having a duplicate 250GB hard disk is a dead expensive way of backing up (unless you had a spare one laying around the house anyway)

1.It was defragging my E: Drive. My programs running were on the C:\ drive. So it wouldn't affect anything unless the programs were using files from the E drive, which it did. Because I forgot and left my old playlist on :\

2. Eww.. I don't think I'd spend time to backup 250 gigs that often. I think I'll just buy 2 damn good seagate 250's and not worry about backing up. but then again, windows loves to break hard drives.

 

[cenotaph]

cenotaph: Depends if it's worth it or not. Having a duplicate 250GB hard disk is a dead expensive way of backing up (unless you had a spare one laying around the house anyway)


Sure, it's expensive, but it's also reliable. In the end, I s'pose it all comes down to how much you consider the data worth -- if it's just random files you wouldn't care about losing, then there's no need.

QUOTE2. Eww.. I don't think I'd spend time to backup 250 gigs that often. I think I'll just buy 2 damn good seagate 250's and not worry about backing up. but then again, windows loves to break hard drives.

Windows doesn't break harddrives. Poor cooling does.

(also, you wouldn't be 'spending' time backing up data if you had them in RAID as it's done automatically by the hardware controlling your RAID-set, but whatever...)