blew up my hard drive

Rhiza

Rhiza

Inspired
Just when I thought things couldn't go any worse, my hard drive just blew up today. Started giving my Windows 7 pc "0x000000f" errors and quickly found out that when I disconnected my third hard drive. It boots up fine.
Too bad for me that 650 GB worth of music projects were stored in that hard drive and I was too lazy to back it up recently.
I seems like it's not a mechanical error, but probably some soldering gone loose or some loose connection on the hard drive. It's quite old.
I'm giving it over to my local PC dealer, they're quite good at handling situations like this, but they charge for it too. Hopefully they can solve this for me.

Just a reminder to you guys that this can happen to you too!

Back up that shit!

*going to dropbox to back up everything I have left*
 
LOL, I kinda encountered the same problem today. My 256G SSD hosting a Windows 7 seems to be dying. I am trying to investigate and backup things from my 2nd OS (I have a dual boot on that machine).
 
Let this serve as a reminder everyone. Back up. Hard drives are relatively cheap. I have a second drive for every drive I own. I always do an automatic back up every night. I'm only screwed if the whole house goes up. But then I'm screwed anyway in that case. Good luck!
 
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henryrobinett said:
Let this serve as a reminder everyone. Back up. Hard drives are relatively cheap. I have a second drive for every drive I own. I always do an automatic back up every night. I'm only screwed if the whole house goes up. But then I'm screwed anyone in that case. Good luck!
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Ditto, what Henry said. I have had my house burglarized and lost tons of photos that I just can't get back. So I now pay for a Flickr account and store all my photos full res up there, and I also buy these little 250gb external drives, and back up often, and then put them in my safe deposit box. I switch out drives every couple of weeks. You should always have something off site. I never thought that I was going to be broken into, never thought that in a million years. You learn the first time it happens to you. One other thing those mybook external drives suck. I have gone through more of those stupid drives in the last five years.
 
if it's not a mechanical error...

I had a circuitboard or pins on a hard drive go bad- (data doctors $1200 to fix, best buy $2400 to fix- not joking)

I took it to this guy on craigslist who owned a store- that had datarecovery in his add

brought it to him- he sent me to ebay to buy the correct make/model circuit board (35 bucks maybe)
gave it to him- and he resolidered it to the HD to get the data off and put it on a new drive I bought- for like $40

best money ever spent
 
May want to suggest this to the repair guys. If it's not a mechanical problem and you have good reason to believe its the circuit board, try to find the exact model drive (ebay). If you have a few choices get the closest match to revisions and dates as well. Then swap the circuit board. Beyond easy and really inexpensive. 6 star screws or less (usually) and the board lifts out of a single socket (usually). I've even purchased bad drives before to rob the PCB's and saved drives.
 
Jeries said:
if it's not a mechanical error...

I had a circuitboard or pins on a hard drive go bad- (data doctors $1200 to fix, best buy $2400 to fix- not joking)

I took it to this guy on craigslist who owned a store- that had datarecovery in his add

brought it to him- he sent me to ebay to buy the correct make/model circuit board (35 bucks maybe)
gave it to him- and he resolidered it to the HD to get the data off and put it on a new drive I bought- for like $40

best money ever spent
Click to expand...

Posted a the same time! I've never seen one soldered, it's usually a socket but you're right. Really inexpensive and effective. And you brought up a point that I didn't mentioned. It'd be a good idea to transfer the data to a new drive for sure.
 
Depending on how bad the damage is you maybe able to use this to pull some of the data back. I was really lucky and got back most of what I lost after a drive failed that I thought was being backed up... As long as the platters spin even somewhat all may not be lost.
SystemRescueCd

Here is the manual for it:
Online-Manual-EN - SystemRescueCd
 
I also back up to external drives. Plus I have an AWS instance with a 200 gig volume that serves as my third, offsite backup. Runs me about $15 a month.
 
I had this happen a while back. I was able to boot in to Linux (USB drive) and do my back my windows files/recordings from inside Linux.
 
Learned this the hard way - ironically after trying to be safe and transferring data from 10 year old hard drives to brand new hard drives which somehow crashed within the month ( nice :D ).
From now on I put all my hard drives on mirrored partitions and just to be safe throw the stuff I can't afford to lose onto 2 TB backup drives ( never plugged in just in case of power surges / lightning strikes ! ).
And read errors aside, blu-ray is a great way to back up 40+GB of data at a time per disc.
It's tedious sure, but not as tedious as losing all your data ;)

P.S. SSD drives aren't cheap, but no moving parts = much lesser chances of failure.
We've all been there and wishing you better luck from now on !
 
Narzugon said:
May want to suggest this to the repair guys. If it's not a mechanical problem and you have good reason to believe its the circuit board, try to find the exact model drive (ebay). If you have a few choices get the closest match to revisions and dates as well. Then swap the circuit board. Beyond easy and really inexpensive. 6 star screws or less (usually) and the board lifts out of a single socket (usually). I've even purchased bad drives before to rob the PCB's and saved drives.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I've been thinking about this as well. Since the computer won't boot when the hard drive is in, It's probably a bad circuitboard. The drive doesn't make any nasty or clicky sounds. Sounds normal. But it gives the computer some kind of kernel panic.

Funeral said:
I had this happen a while back. I was able to boot in to Linux (USB drive) and do my back my windows files/recordings from inside Linux.
Click to expand...

I actually tried this too, the problem is that it's probably a bad circuit board and the hard drive freaks out the computer. It wont even boot.
 
Just a quick update, I found a circuitboard (I think it's called Logic Board)
Costed me 46 US dollars and It's on it's way as we speak! :)

Hopefully this will fix the error :p
 
I replaced my laptop with SSD drive which made it so much faster. The SSD came with a USB interface and I use the old drive to clone as a backup. I also use a NAS, external USB and several 32GB USB sticks. You cannot have too many backups.
 
I use DriveImage XML and have them backed up to either a USB harddrive or netorked drive.

About 15 years ago, Internet file hosting sites were all the rage. They were basically public cloud storage sites with a very small limit. Today they no longer exist along with all the files they were hosting.
 
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