| Author | Message | ||
     Chauly |
I have an IDE drive that I would like to recover some data from. It stopped booting reliably, and I don't have another machine to plug it into as a slave drive. Any recommendations for people to talk to? | ||
| Hootowl |
A friend with a computer you can plug it in to. Data recovery is ENORMOUSLY expensive. | ||
| Reepicheep |
Do you speak Unix? Boot up a bootable Linux CD Distribution, mount the drive, and copy the data that way. | ||
| Hootowl |
Why can't you plug it in as a slave drive in the computer you have? Why do you need an additional computer? | ||
| Ratbuell |
Get this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/USB-2-0-SATA-IDE-2-5-3-5-H ard-Drive-Converter-Cable-/300405332937?pt=LH_Defa ultDomain_0&hash=item45f18d9bc9#ht_2820wt_1187 Cables and power supply. Turns any drive into, effectively, a USB drive. I've got one from when my laptop took a dump and it's invaluable. And cheap. | ||
| Chauly |
I got a SATA-IDE Converter, but that didn't work, although I'm not sure if it's just because, or it's because the IDE drive is worse than I suspect. I'll try the USB thing next. Thanks all! | ||
| Balloyd66 |
If all else fails and the disk is having a physical issue inside (bearings or such), stick it in the freezer overnight, slap it in the machine the next morning, be ready with a flash drive, and see if it'll boot long enough to get what you need. Sometimes the cold contracts the metals just enough to free up whatever's sticking. | ||
| Hootowl |
Thanks for that Brent. I've used that trick several times, but didn't want to post it for fear of being ridiculed. I have no idea why it works, but I've made drives that did nothing but click work long enough to get data off them by freezing them for a few hours. So if I'm insane, at least I'm not alone  | ||
| Greg_e |
I've done the freezer trick too, just put the drive in a sealed plastic bag to keep the water off of it when you pull it back out. The freezer trick became popular when the IBM Deskstar (DeathStar) drives became popular, the heads would touch down and weld to the platter, freezing broke that weld and let you recover some of your data before the heads touched down again. | ||
| Reepicheep |
Ive tried the freeze trick a bunch of times and it never worked... I fell less dumb knowing it worked for somebody... | ||
| Blake |
Do desktop (full size) HDD's last longer sitting flatwise or on edge? I'm thinking on edge, but am just guessing. I have our Dell XPX sitting so the HDD is on edge. It's about eight years old now I think. Side topic: I need an ultra-simple solution to full disk image/backup. I've asked before, and I never did find a simple plug and play type of solution. I want a mirror drive so that if the main drive craters, the mirror drive can be plugged in its place and all is restored. I don't want to have to install any new OS or anything. Dell XPS something or other, Pentium D 2.8 GHz running Win XP SP3. The thing works great for how we use it. Please don't advise me to upgrade to 7 or Vista. I'm happy with XP Pro and don't want to deal with inevitable software issues. | ||
| Blake |
I tried the freeze trick, then the heat trick, then the wack it around trick. None worked. Old laptop. Sent it to the expensive data recovery folks. Oddly they said it was toast, no recovery possible. LOL. | ||
| Hootowl |
Backup, cloning, and mirroring are different things. If you want a mirror, your BIOS may allow you to do that. If it doesn't, SATA RAID controllers are pretty inexpensive. Two drives are used and are 'mirrors' of each other. If one goes South, you simply replace it and the mirror is rebuilt by the controller. No data is lost. If you want to clone your drive, you can do that too, but it'll only be as current as the last time you cloned it. A traditional backup typically involves data only, not the entire OS and installed applications. There are full backup applications (Symantec makes one) that will do a restore from "bare iron" of an entire volume from the latest incremental backup you have. You'll need an external hard drive or network drive to store the backups on. | ||
| Hootowl |
I can set a mirror up for you and clone your existing drive to it in a few hours. It'll cost you two new drives, possibly a controller, and several bottles of beer. | ||
| Froggy |
They are designed and tested to operate both ways, my understanding is the bearings are designed for that.
But the built in backup program in Vista/7 is fantastic, it will even let you make disk images to restore from. The thing you want though is called RAID like Hootowl suggests. Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. There are several different types of it, but RAID1 will require two hard drives, and both of them will have the exact same data in the event one fails. I don't think this will be a practical option for you, as I do believe it will require you to start from scratch, or at least it won't be easy to convert to it without re-installing Windows. In terms of cost and practicality, your best bet is a program like Norton Ghost, it lets you burn a copy of your entire hard drive to DVDs, and in the event of a failure you can reinstall off the DVDs, your computer will be exactly the way it was at the time the backup was made. DVDs are dirt cheap, the only downside is the time involved to run the backup and physically swap the DVDs after they fill (only can put 4.5GB on each). If you did this only once a season, it wouldn't be inconvenient, and in a worst case scenario you are out only 4 months worth whatever you do. Personally, I just do file backing up, if I ever lost a hard drive or Windows dies, I usually am better off starting from scratch. I use a program called Crashplan to have my computers backup on each other, so "my documents", settings, desktop, and game saves are all backed up. The rest I really don't care about or can redownload. | ||
| Reepicheep |
Raid is the most painless. But it doesn't help you if the house burns down. I think raid, along with a yearly / quarterly / whatever risk you can tolerate backup of your documents to a disk you leave "somewhere else" should cover most scenarios. A cheap external drive at your inlaws house (or even Hoot's house) would work fine. Best to encrypt it though, or Hoot may blackmail you for more than beer! | ||
| Hootowl |
You won't have to start from scratch if you want to do a mirror. Your original drive will not be part of the array, and can be cloned to the array once it is set up. Everything will be as it was, except you'll have two drives with the same data on them. The controller keeps them in synch. Windows sees a single drive. | ||
| Blake |
>>> They are designed and tested to operate both ways, my understanding is the bearings are designed for that. I grasp that. Yet the question remains. The backup doesn't work for what I want. I have a load of software that would take days to re-install and configure. I had norton ghost on an old system and never could get it to work. BadWeB currently runs on a RAID machine. I recall there was some kind of plug in disk system that automatically kept hot backups, but I don't think it would work for boot-up, not sure. It was VERY slick. I think Court has the system. So there's no way to plug in an identical drive and run ghost on it such that if the main drive fails I can pop in the ghosted drive and all works fine? | ||
| Hootowl |
Nah, I'll just steal his porn. | ||
| Blake |
I use gmail and Norton for offsite backups. | ||
| Blake |
How me implement? | ||
| Hootowl |
"So there's no way to plug in an identical drive and run ghost on it such that if the main drive fails I can pop in the ghosted drive and all works fine?" There is. But it'll only be as current as the last time you performed the clone. I can give you an ISO you can boot off of that has the tool on it that you need to do the clone. | ||
| Froggy |
Ghost can do that, we used do similar at my job. Ghost has a "disk to disk" option that copies the entire drive. We would use it in classrooms, given all the computers are the pretty much the same. Get replacement drive from Dell, take a good hard drive, run Ghost and it will clone them. Total time on site is about 20 minutes or so. It will totally do what you want. | ||
| Froggy |
I haven't seen anything to prove one way is better than another. I have thousands of computers at my job that I service, some upright and some on their side, and I wouldn't say the failure rate is higher for either configuration. When they fail, they fail. | ||
| Blake |
Cool. How do I connect the ghost drive to the computer, just clip it onto the existing cable. Need adapter? | ||
| Hootowl |
I'm not aware of any difference in failure rate either. You'd think that if the drive were on its side, the top head would have less of a tendency to touch down, but gravity has little to do with head crashes. They literally fly over the surface. The air being pulled along the surface of the disk by its rotation keeps the head away. Stop the disk, and the heads touch down. A finger print will not fit between the head and the platter, they're that close to each other. Smaller read/write coil, closer to the disk surface = higher data density. They really are marvelous feats of engineering. | ||
| Hootowl |
What does the data cable look like? Ribbon cable or a flat narrow one about a half an inch wide? | ||
| Hootowl |
"How me implement?" You'll need two drives and a RAID controller. I'm checking to see whether your computer has one built in. If it's 8 years old, probably not. Oops, XPS something or other doesn't help...PM me your asset tag. (5-7 character alpha-numeric number on the back of the box) (Message edited by hootowl on September 16, 2011) | ||
| Blake |
With the cover off, I can't see the data cable, just a connector with four wires. It's a Maxtor Diamand Max 10, 160 GB, Model 6V160E0 (Message edited by blake on September 16, 2011) |
