Hard Drive Failure

I feel compelled to share this with everyone in hopes you can avoid, or at least have a possible solution, should you experience a hard drive failure.

My laptop has been running great for as long as I've had it. Never a problem. Saturday morning, I sat down to a "blue screen" that took me by surprise. I read the message and figured ok, I'll reboot...it's probably a driver incompatibility or something.

Unfortunately, a reboot yielded a "no bootable disk found" error from the bios. I whip out an emergency rescue disk I have that can "supposedly" recover from hard drive failures. But the problem there is, the hard drive isn't even recognized by the bios.

Things are not looking good at this point. I do not have a backup of my most important files. I head out to buy a notebook hard drive. Bestbuy, nope. Circuit City, nope. By chance, a local computer shop (I'm in a relatively small town) has one. I setup the drive for temporary use so I could get web access and do some research. As luck would have it, there is a company in our area that specializes in off-site backups, disaster hard drive recovery, etc.

I call the local company this morning and explain the situation. Bios doesn't recognize the drive, nothing I have can access it. Said it would take them a few hours if they could get access to it, and they are about a mile from my house. I drop it off, along with a 160 gig external USB drive to put the contents on. A few hours later, I get a dreaded call that their equipment cannot read the drive. Said my next solution would be a more specialized data recovery house that could disassemble the drive and try to salvage the "plates." Said that would run me 500-1500 dollars just to shake their hands.

So I came back home and started researching more. Came across a product called SpinRite from www.grc.com . At $89.00, it's far cheaper than sending the drive off and it has some pretty big claims about what it can do. So I open it up, create the .img file, then use nero to create a CD with the spinrite and some special DOS they use.

I shut the laptop down, removed the new drive and replaced the damaged one. I boot up and the CD begins to load SpinRite. I follow the menus and sure enough, it sees my hard drive! I let it take it's course and after about thirty minutes or so, it finishes. I'm thinking "surely it takes more than this???" So I remove the CD and reboot. To my amazement, my laptop boots up with the old hard drive! Talk about a happy camper!

I'm frantically moving important data files over to my USB external drive, then will spend the evening writing CD backups of critical data. I can't believe how foolish I was. I had my own software products I've written (commercial), well over 30 websites, my password file that has all my passwords (I use random generated passwords for everything). I wouldn't even be able to access reseller accounts, couldn't issue product keys for my software...nothing. All gone.

If you haven't backed up lately, consider this a wakeup call. I was one of those that didn't think something like this could ever happen to me. It did. I was lucky this time. I can't say enough about SpinRite. An $89 sofware product did what professionals couldn't do, and saved me over a thousand dollar in recovery costs, not to mention untold thousands of dollars in work.

I'm off to the store to buy some CDRs. I'll never take a chance like this again.

GTech

 

Hey, now you should start a data recovery business!

 

SpinRite is a quality product, the guy who wrote it seems a bit egotistical but is very good at what he does and proudly writes everything in 100% pure assembler (this may have changed now but I doubt it)

 

nice post gtech, at least you've earnt the 'tech' bit now.

dynamic passwords !! ouch, i just change mine once a month....and for a week the following month keep forgetting to use the new set.
Steve over at grc.com has some quality products, although i never new what spinrite was all about, normally use just shoot the messenger and firewall leak test.
i will pass this info onto a friend who is having the same problem with his h/d not recognised.

feel free to post me a copy and password for spinrite

 

Is there a service that can send your important data on the moon or even mars, to secure myself from such failures, you never know!

 

Thanks for sharing your software find. Hard drive problems are the worst...you're damn lucky you found a product that actually helped.

I keep several strategically secured printed copies of all my passwords and priority files. If you work for yourself or run a company it's vital to have an emergency backup plan in case of personal fire, flood, earthquake, etc. If you become ill or have an accident you'll need documented info that would allow someone to come in an take care of things for you. It's a pain to get done and easy to ignore bo so incredibly important.

 

Thank you for the nice post Gtech and for sharing your experince.. Well a hard disk failure would be a nightmare to me... I am afraid even about thinking about it!!! I think I need a full backup soon

 

If you are looking at GRC.com then read the stuff he says about Realplayer giving out your personal info(its been a few years since i read it).

Try shields up too.. nice little free tool.

 

Steve! Gibson! is a bigger wacko than Nintendo.

http://grcsucks.com/

 

Is there a reason why someone gave me a red rep for my earlier post in this thread??? I'm totally baffled.

 

If the computer can read them, DVD-RW would be much better since they can hold way more stuff and be used over and over and over and over and....

 

Thanks everyone for the feedback and suggestions.

DS, your post offered some great additional advice, which I've taken. I've prepared two backup CDs with all my important information, web hosting accounts, email access, etc in case the worst happens. One copy to my wife, one copy to my best friend.

Nintendo, will have to look into DVD-RW. I've not explored the technology at all. My laptop can play a DVD, but that's about it. How much data can a DVD-RW hold?

 

4.7GB, it's actually pretty nice when your pirating.....I mean previewing movies

 

It is a good habit to have daily backup. Few days later you can have everything changed. Or you can install RAID in your computer (if you dont have laptop) - that will write data in two HD and the faster is transfer.

 

4.7 Gigs!!