Everything on my hard drive got destroyed

May 28 2004

[dennisw]

60 gigabytes. Never had problems with it. Yesterday Windows XP froze a few times. Then the computer refused to boot up again. Boot sector wiped out? I can deal with that! I then installed this drive as a slave and it wasn't recognized... was invisible.

With Partition Magic this hard drive shows up as 60 gig of (exact words) unallocated space. It had 3 partitions which are now all gone.

I used the Western Digital Utilities and the hard drive checks out as being in good shape. No errors.

I was using Norton Anti Virus. Using a firewall on a cable connection.

I don't see any references on internet to hard drives being killed all at once.

The hard drive was 50% backed up.I will consider a data recovery company if the price is reasonable.

[dennisw]

The getback program mentioned here recovered everything on my NFTS HD. Same HD I posted about here

http://www.runtime.org/

[RightWhale]

Both my hard drives were trashed so bad they would have to do what they do with hard drives that are in major fires. Electronics shot. Maybe mount the platter itself in another drive unit and see if it will read.

[CARDINALRULES]

I made them at Christmas and they were great.

[savedbygrace]

Try Data Rescue:

Data Rescue

[dennisw]

I've read of people sometimes getting lucky by taking the electronics board off an identical (or same series) hard drive and mounting it onto the hosed one. Recover the data and place it on new HD.

Of course this works only when the problem is shot electronics and not trashed internals.

Your USB external is the best idea

[RightWhale]

The USB external is fairly fast and not inconvenient. If the chassis fries another hard drive (I half expect it now after all this) it won't be so serious.

[Billthedrill]

Oh, great. You just killed a room full of SysAdmins with that remix.

I'm gonna play it for the HelpDesk next. BUWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!

[spodefly]

Same thing happened to me about 3 months ago with a Western Digital 80GB drive. No computer, and I tried it in 3 different machines, would even recognize the drive ... it was a dead dog.

I didn't freak out about it too much as being a WD specific problem because I have 5 other computers with a total of 13 drives among them, and they are all Western Digital drives, and have been fine, some for many years at a time. WD drives have always seemed very solid. In fact, I still have a 6gb WD drive that started out in a Win98 (now win2k) machine back in 1999 working daily as the system disk for that machine.

I also back up each machines drives onto drives on the other machines, so I didn't lose more than a few weeks of non-critical data. Critical data always lives on mirrored (RAID1) drives here at the Vast Spodefly World Headquarters and Bunker Compound^TM.

[Paulus Invictus]

Another option for freedom from such XP disasters is called MAC (but Freepers in the majority appear to be addicts to disasters, complex and endless windows fixes and HD repairs).

[Marie Antoinette]

We've lost a WD hard drive in the past also. We have had much better luck with our Seagate drives. :)

[SamAdams76]

Usually I can get my hard drive going by dropping it out my second story window onto the driveway. But one time, my hard drive was especially stubborn. No matter how many times I threw it out the window onto the driveway, it still refused to boot up. So I drove to Boston and climbed the Bunker Hill monument all the way to the top and threw it off of there. But damn, I missed the pavement and it landed on the grass instead. So I had to hike all the way back down and waste a half hour trying to find it again. Once I located it, I had to walk all the way up the stairs (about 500 of them) and throw it again. My legs felt like rubber. But this time my aim was good and it hit the pavement below, although I almost hit an old lady (and a lawsuit). This time, the hard drive fired right up.

But wouldn't you know it, about six months later, the darn thing froze up again! I wasn't going to mess around this time so I went to the top of the Prudential Tower (about 52 stories up) and flung it into Boylston Street, about 600 feet below. However, by the time I got back down there, it was gone. Somebody had stolen it! So somewhere in the Boston area, there is a thief with a hard drive that contains all my personal stuff and about 40 gigs of my favorite MP3s. What a bummer.

[bwteim]

Better than hard disks is to burn critical data to CDs on a regular basis and test the CDs in another computer before archiving them.

[The_Media_never_lie]

Recipe looks good!

[Lancey Howard]

(she almost froze the LCD liquid!)

One night this past winter I left my cell phone in the car and the temp dropped to about zero. Next day, my phone was frozen and I had to thaw it out in front of the fire. Still works fine.

[varon]

I don't see any references on internet to hard drives being killed all at once.

Only those in the proximity to Judge Greer's courtroom.