May have lost 1TB of media

Lee H

Hi

I bet u all feel sorry for me yer

Its a samsung F3 1TB drive had it less than 6 months, only 88gig free so theres like soo much stuff on it

Have connected it to 2 pc's doesnt work on either, it does have a slight vibration to it though when i touch it. This drive has not been moved touched or banged in any way watsoever so am well pissed off that its happened

Is there anything I can do apart from time travel back to the other day and install another drive for a raid 1, lol

Lee H

tiersten

Does it get detected by the PC BIOS? Does it appear in your OS? etc...

If the two PCs are working correctly and the drive has actually completely died then your options are:

1. Consider it a total loss. Slap yourself a few times and then swear that you'll make backups in the future. RAID1 doesn't count as a backup :P
2. If the data on there is sufficiently valuable to you then you can pay a big sack of money to a data recovery company for them to attempt to get it back.

crrussell3

I have had a drive like that before. For some reason Windows wouldn't recognize it, bios would, so booted up Knoppix and was able to see the data to recover it. Always worth a shot.

Have you checked Disk Management to see if its listed as a drive?

Lee H

drive is not detected in the BIOS

dont understand how this has happened

I connected another sata drive to copy over some data i was giving to someone then i removed this second sata, that was the last time my 1TB was working

could there be any setting in the BIOS thats changed?

this has pissed me off big time

I think I meant raid 0 ya know the mirror

kriscamaro68

Lee H wrote: »

drive is not detected in the BIOS

I think I meant raid 0 ya know the mirror

Raid 0 is striping raid 1 is mirror. Like he said its still not a backup as you can see internal drives fail and yes both can fail. Have multiple back ups that only get plugged in when you do just that backup or restore. As for that drive sounds like its a goner. Sorry man I know it sucks cause I have been there before to.

tiersten

Are you sure you've plugged it into the correct SATA port?

Have you tried another set of cables?

Check that the BIOS is actually set to look for a drive on that SATA port.

Have you tried another drive on that SATA port?

Have you tried a different SATA power cable?

You should have already done some of these checks by trying the drive on that second PC but thought I'd better ask just in case.

RAID doesn't count as backup even if is mirrored. It doesn't protect you from accidental deletion or corruption for one thing. If your PSU goes bang and supplies mains voltage to the PC components then you've lost everything. As kriscamaro68 said, it is possible for multiple drives to fail at the same time. If you've bought multiple drives and they're all from the same batch then the possibility of a manufacturing defect killing them all at the same time is significantly higher especially if they're all active and have similar power on hours + workloads.

If you don't think that modern HD have manufacturing defects then look up the IBM Deskstar range and the recent Seagate HD firmware issues. Both had the potential for multiple drive failure.

kevozz

You don't understand how this happened? Any electronic device, especially hard drives can fail at anytime. We got several cases of Seagate hard drives in once with >75% failure rate (failed burnin or would not show in BIOS).


Try the Samsung Utilities disk. It's free and you may get lucky.
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/support/utilities/Support_HUTIL.html

As said in other posts, depending on how important the data is, you may want to try a professional service. I found several in the US with free estimates on the cost of data recovery. Try finding one in the UK that gives free estimates and guarantees the price.


Try flashing the motherboard BIOS. Maybe something got screwed up when you were connecting the other Sata drive. I've used this fix before when a mobo wouldnt' recognize and drive, optical or HD connected.


If you're not going to pay for recovery and all else fails, put your hard drive in the freezer (1-4 hours) and try hooking it up again. I didn't think it would work until i tried it, and it worked. I revived a laptop hard drive for about 1 hour so i could copy all the data. Four weeks of attempts to recover the data failed. The hard drive would not show up in the BIOS. 1TB of data is a lot of info though.
http://www.trisweb.com/archives/2005/06/15/hard-disk-recovery-the-freezer-trick/
http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/01/freeze-your-hard-drive-to-recover-data.html

crrussell3

If you try the freezer trick, I would recommend wrapping it in a towel first and placing it in a zip block bag and remove as much air as possible. I know of someone who just threw it into the freezer and pulled it out after a few hours only to realize they placed it right on a bunch of frost (not the brightest thing to do).

ColbyG

Ah man, that's brutal. I lost around 750gb one time and decided I'd never let it happen again. I now back up my fileserver to a NAS, and once every few months I back everything up to some loose drives I have laying around. Losing data is horrible.

Hope you're able to recover your stuff.

chrisone

dang that sucks you lost all your ****. I feel for you man! hahaha just kidding , you know someone had to say it on this forum hahaha

But on a serious note, im sorry man, that sucks especially that you had it for 6 months only. Dang all that study material you had too i would be so mad if i lost all that data :-\ sorry bud

kevozz

crrussell3 wrote: »

If you try the freezer trick, I would recommend wrapping it in a towel first and placing it in a zip block bag and remove as much air as possible. I know of someone who just threw it into the freezer and pulled it out after a few hours only to realize they placed it right on a bunch of frost (not the brightest thing to do).

Excellent point! I used a ziploc bag, static bag, and wrapped it in a towel.

nel

i think what lee is trying to say is that he has lostt 900GB of p*rn hahaha ...sorry mate i couldnt help myself!

Lee H

LMAO @ Nel, thats funny, no prom material though just films music and study material

Will take me a long time to get it all back, I need to try the freezer trick but first i need another 1TB drive to copy all the data to, £60 they are grrrrr

will let yall know how i got on

LukeQuake

Chief - I hate to say this but why didn't you have a backup?

I appreciate that it's alot of data but an additional internal 1TB HDD is nothing in comparision to the hassle that it's now causing you.

Forsaken_GA

Lesson to be learned - don't trust important data to a single device. It should be some level of RAID, either 1 or 5 at the least. That doesn't do much to protect you from stupid stuff like filesystem corruption or doing a recursive delete from the wrong directory or on the wrong file name, but it does offer some protection against a device which you know is going to fail sooner or later.

LukeQuake

Obviously this is alot of data to lose in one go but... personally I backup everything that critical from either 1 of my 2 internal drives to an external HDD and then to my iDisk (online storage)!

If someone breaks in a steals my PC, I'm covered!

miller811

Having worked for a vendor supporting in house servers, for over 20 years, I tell them that your data is only as good as your last backup....

good words to live by

arwes

Yep freezer trick should work for you. Friend of mine had a ext drive keel over like that, and his attempt with the freezer technique was pretty funny. The drive would work just fine until it would start to warm up. Then it was back in the freezer and he'd get some more data off it. Took him a few hours but he got all he needed off the drive.

Lee H

I thought the drive had some movement inside it but its dead as a dodo

Its in freezer now been there for just over 1 hour, when do you think it will be cold enough to test, 1st time trying this so havent a clue

DevilWAH

hold on is this one drive of a raid 0 array?

in which case you only option if you really need it back is to get a professional company to recover it for you (they can recover from a platter snaped in 2 if you want to pay them the money!)

the freazer trick can work for drivers with badly worn bearings, as it works by contracting the metal and holding every thing tighter in place. it can also push dry solder joint togather to make contacts. but generaly only works for short periods

if you have no movement at all though then its much more terminal. look around for data recovery companies. some are getting quite reasonable prices and many offer a free inspection of the drive and can tell you the problem and chance of recover.

Lee H

Drive was in freezer for about 3-4 hoursand came out very cold, there was condensation all over the drive which cant be good news

anyways the drive didnt work, nor did it work once back to room temp so its now back in the freezer for a full 24 hours

fingers crossed, drive has date on it 2009-09 so it can defo be a warranty job, has anyone ever done a warranty call on a HDD would they attempt a repair or send out a replacement, this would have to be done direct with samsung

has anyone sent a HDD to them

Forsaken_GA

Lee H wrote: »

Drive was in freezer for about 3-4 hoursand came out very cold, there was condensation all over the drive which cant be good news

anyways the drive didnt work, nor did it work once back to room temp so its now back in the freezer for a full 24 hours

fingers crossed, drive has date on it 2009-09 so it can defo be a warranty job, has anyone ever done a warranty call on a HDD would they attempt a repair or send out a replacement, this would have to be done direct with samsung

has anyone sent a HDD to them

I've only actually had one hard drive die on me over the years, I usually outgrow them and need to upgrade long before I run them into the ground. The manufacturer of the one drive I did have to send back was Seagate, and they shipped me a new drive 2 day shipping at no cost, though I did need to give up my credit card number so they could charge me if I didn't actually send the defective drive back. Most manufacturers are going to attempt a repair (at least not in a time frame that's likely to benefit you, they might eventually get around to refurb'ing the drive)

tiersten

Lee H wrote: »

Drive was in freezer for about 3-4 hoursand came out very cold, there was condensation all over the drive which cant be good news

Did you not bag the drive first?

Lee H wrote: »

fingers crossed, drive has date on it 2009-09 so it can defo be a warranty job, has anyone ever done a warranty call on a HDD would they attempt a repair or send out a replacement, this would have to be done direct with samsung

Chances are that they'll give you a new or refurbished drive. Don't rely or expect them to repair the drive. The fact that the drive is wet may hamper your chances at a warranty replacement or repair. If they've incorporated any enviromental sensors like moisture detection dots/strips then all that condensation will void the warranty.

Depending on the contents of that drive, you may not wish to send it in for warranty anyway. We destroy all drives at work as it is better to eat the cost of a brand new drive than for customer data to be potentially leaked.

dynamik

tiersten wrote: »

Depending on the contents of that drive, you may not wish to send it in for warranty anyway. We destroy all drives at work as it is better to eat the cost of a brand new drive than for customer data to be potentially leaked.

That's why I never return any of my failed drives.

DevilWAH

Manafactures will not atempt to repair a drive they will jsut bin it and send a new one. IF you look at the warrenty it will say the warrenty only covered the physical drive and not any data stored on it.

the compinies who offer repair services has rooms set up to allow them to do recovery. they will do things like remove the platters from a drive with broken electronics and place them inside a new drive. The trouble is this needs to be carried out in a dust free enviorment (a speck of dust 1 tenth the diamator of a human hair can casue a drive to stop working)

so it often needs specilised equipment and trained people. But like I say unless you have pulverised the oplatters to a fine dust they can usualy recove at least some of the data.

Forsaken_GA

dynamik wrote: »

That's why I never return any of my failed drives.

(hard drive + drill press + crucible) * alcohol = enjoyable weekend