hard drive failure - from bad to worse

[Jeffrey Fusaro]

our 'c' drive crapped out last weekend. it started the 'click of death' march and it hasn't been heard from since (i tried the 'freeze the hard drive' trick, but that did not work - it just clicked slower than when it was warm).

no problem - i had a second internal hard drive that was there for data back-up.

so, i installed a brand new 'c' drive and started intializing and reloading software.

once the operating system was installed, i went into 'my computer' to look for both drives so that i could start copying from the back-up to the 'c' drive.

no back-up disk could be found.

well, actually, the back-up disk could be found. IT WAS NOW THE 'C' DRIVE!

when i put the cover back on the computer, the power cable to the new (blank) hard drive got knocked loose. when i started the computer, it could only recognize one drive and started to load the operating system on top of all of my back-up data. of course, since i was booting from the restore disk, i had no way of knowing what was happening.

classic ID10T error, if i say so, myself. D-OH!

so.... now i finally have all the hardware and software figured out. i have two brand new hard drives in the machine and the overwritten back-up drive is now sitting on my desk, until i figure out if i can get any old files off of it.

luckily 99.5% of my digital images (around 30k images) had been backed-up on two sets of dvd's - one set at home and one set in the bank vault. the remainder had not yet been archived prior to the hard drive failure. they may, or may not be, on the old back-up. not sure when the last auto back-up had a chance to run.

but, we are still missing music files and all other data files (word, excel, etc).

is there any data recovery software that i can use to reclaim the data that was overwritten when i re-installed the operating system?

[John Keeton]

Jeffrey, I can't offer any help on the recovery of the files, although from my limited understanding most of the data should still be there as long as there was not a hard format of the drive??

I do, however, have some unsolicited advice for the future - Carbonite online backup. It is a pretty slick program and the annual cost of $50 is cheap insurance for this type of thing. In addition, if you have a house fire, that backup drive at home won't save any of your data!! The pics of the house and furniture sure would come in handy in filling out loss claim forms.

Good luck on the recovery effort.

[Angus Hines]

Thanks for the tip there John was looking for something like this....and the best part is they have no data limit restrictions....all for just $50.00 a year and I don't have to think about it or remember to back up.....Absolutely PRICELESS.

[Matt Meiser]

I've had good luck with Restorer 2000. It will recover deleted files, deleted partitions, etc. But if new data was written over the old the old will probably be corrupted. A modern hard drive is a big place. If you are lucky, the new OS installed over unimportant files or blank space. There's no way to tell without using the recovery software. There's a demo you can download and try--it might give you some idea of what to expect. It runs about $50. I'm sure there are others too.

The next option would be attempting data recovery from the failed disk. That is VERY expensive.

[John Schreiber]

This looked interesting to me. I just did some research on external backups and it seems like they have a high level of dissatisfaction. People usually like them when they set them up, but often have trouble recovering their data when they need to. Some also use a lot of system resources and could slow your computer down and/or cause crashes.

I think they could be part of a solution, but I don't think they are a sure thing.

I do a backup to a portable hard drive for most of my stuff and for the really important stuff, I also zip it up with a password and email it to myself at g-mail.

[Matt Meiser]

The idea of net backup is great but it would make me nervous to give someone else my data. Gmail is about as far as I'll go with respect to that. But it is important to get your backups "off site." We back up to my shop computer which is 80' from the house. Plus about once a year we burn a dvd of photos and give it to my parents for safe keeping.

What could be cool is to trade services with a trusted friend or family member--back up to each other. If I ever get real internet service I might look into doing that with my parents. With a couple of fairly inexpensive VPN routers you could even create a vpn link between the two networks and directly access each other's computers.

[Chuck Wintle]

Jeffery,

You may want to try a program called "test disk" that can recover files such as jpg's and others. Its free and ther is a version for windows too. Just google "test disk".

[John Keeton]

Carbonite is highly recommended - for whatever that is worth, and is double encrypted before storage. I agree that there are risks involved, but Carbonite seems to be the best out there presently.

[Neal Clayton]

plug in the old hard drive, and start the computer with it hanging loose, as it spins up, smack it on your desk (hard!), sometimes that'll knock em loose for a few minutes so you can copy data over. but don't bet on it lasting too long after...

[roman fedyk]

OO Software has a couple of programs that will recover data files, pictures, etc. I have used it to recover damaged hard drives and it works very well.

However the thing with recovery software is that it recovers the files into file 1, file 2, etc. without any titles. So you can tell it is an excel file but not which one.

You have to open each one manually to determine what it is and whether you want to save it as an excel file rather than a recovered file.

It is tedious work and that is why it is so expensive to have your hard drives recovered by professionals.

You can see their software, and download trial software, at
www.oo-software.com and look for Disk Recovery 4 personal.

Let me know if you need any other information as I have lots of experience with this sort of thing.

[Matt Meiser]

I don't recall Restorer 2000 working that way.

[Eric DeSilva]

You might also want to look at Mozy and Jungledisk. Prices for Mozy are about the same, and the first 2GB is free. Jungle disk on the other hand... $0.15 GB/mo., but it runs off Amazon's S3 servers and it substantially faster, I believe, than either Mozy or Carbonite. Be aware that Carbonite has some issues--I gather it doesn't back up .dlls or .exes unless you manually select them, which seems odd. More important for me, neither Mozy nor Carbonite will support back up of external drives or NAS boxes.

I have yet to find a good solution for on line back ups, but as a photographer married to another photographer and a digital audio freak (ripped all of my 3500 CDs in lossless format), I seem to have larger data needs than most--I think I've exhausted the 750 GB capacity of my NAS.

So far, my solution has been using a pair of 1 terabyte NAS boxes--Network Attached Storage, basically a file server on your network that can be mounted as a drive on any computer on the network--that
run RAID 5. RAID 5 is redundant and allows 100% recovery in the event of a single drive failure at an efficiency cost of (N-1)/N, where N is the number of drives in the array. Each of mine is 4 x 250 GB, so I get about 750 GB of usable storage out of each. One drive is at home, one at the office, powered off.

Note that I don't even bother to create system backups for the working drive. I assume that is all lost and count on doing a fresh install of everything when a drive goes bad. Hadda do that not too long ago, in fact. Took me about a day, but that is just time. The real data is the content I've created over the years...

[Phil Thien]

You can probably still retrieve your old documents and settings. But having literally thousands and thousands of $$$ in D/R hardware and software, I can tell you this: No single application will do it all. Where I am attempting logical recoveries, I often use several different apps (R-Studio, GDB, UFS Explorer, etc.) to see which one does a better job putting the pieces back together. And very often I find myself just jumping into Winhex to patch things back together where the others can't do it adequately.

I would download a bunch of them and run them in demo mode and see which ones seems to find more stuff. Once you find a winner, pay your money and get your data.

Good luck!

[Bill Cunningham]

I have a Western Digital 'Book' Portable hard drive, had it for almost a year, and it's always worked fine for me... I just upgraded my computer, and had to reinstall all my programs, and used the file transfer wiz. in XP to load and transfer all the data from my old system.. Used Moz backup to restore Firefox, Thunderbird, and Sea Monkey from my old system so everything was transfered including all email, passwords, and all settings.. It's like I was still on the old machine only a lot faster.. The new machine came with a new registered copy of XP-Pro.. There was no way I was going to fight with Vista to get things done..

[Mike DeHart]

I bought myself a christmas present of a monitor calibration tool (I use the mac for a lot of photo processing) and it crapped out in the middle of the maiden voyage and the mac would go to a gray screen when i rebooted it. Couldn't get it past the gray screen after trying a few troubleshooting things. fired it up from the cd, turned the time machine on and told it to go back to last night, and 90 minutes later had a fully functioning machine! Love the mac. Now I have to figure out why the calibration tool broke it....