hard drive woes

I can't help with the utility, but I think I have a good simple backup plan. Both PCs have only the Operating System and programs that didn't have an install path option on C:, all data and most programs are on large external USB drives. I back up the external drive by moving the USB plug to the other PC and copying all the recently changed root- directory folders into \Backup\[date]\ folders. It takes a while but runs unattended. I didn't buy two new PCs for this, just re-purposed the older one when I upgraded.

A USB adapter cable that will operate a bare drive can be very useful.

Jim Wilkins

Norton Ghost can mirror a hard drive pretty well, but its gonna be hit and miss if the drive is damaged.

There a a buncha companies which recover data from screwed up hard drives:

But I hear they don't do their thing very inexpensively.

I backup critical data "offsite" simply by uploading it to the scads of storage space which comes with my Comcast account. That way gives me protection in the unlikely case of fire or flood where my computer is located.

I've been using WS_FTP LE to move those files to and from my Comcast storage space. It has an easy to use "Windows Explorer" style interface and is still available free at places like:

Jeff

You never had them on in the first place, did you? ;-)

I once had great success with GetDataBack

At USD79, it may not qualify as inexpensive, but if I remember correctly, they let you download a free test version that will tell you which files are recoverable, but not actually recover them.

Thanks, just what I was looking for. First, I'd better buy two more 1.5 Tbyte drives.

Karl

Karl, you really need offsite backup for the most important stuff.

i

He needs a Raid 5 system for that much data storage. That plus a backup will have him never losing data..

Put it in the freezer for a few hours, pull off data, repeat.

Ghost 2003 failed and reported Disk Error when I tried it on the drive from a Dell laptop that smoked. Windows can copy it without reporting a problem (which doesn't mean there isn't one).

Second on both.

For offsite I have two of the little pocket HDs and a designated staging area on one of my machines with a big disk. I push zipped and encrypted files to the local staging area periodically during the weeks / month. When the staging area (Vault0) is updated enough I get the pocket HD I keep in the gun safe and update it from Vault0. Then I take this updated HD to the bank and it goes into my safe deposit box and the other pocket HD from there comes back home, gets updated and then put in the gun safe. Pretty cheap, not overly complex and covers most contingencies. I may eventually go to remote mirroring to another site (1,700 miles away) if I have the time and money to set it up.

I had a drive that one morning complained of problems reading the drive, turned out to be outlook.pst file, the systems was giving CRC errors on that file but the Windows file system checking showed no errors even with a full surface scan. I eventually wrote a small prog to read the data and ignored the bad sector reads and filled them in with crap, then ran the outlook recovery program and it identified 1 bad email record, which was of no consequence in the end, so the data was to all intents restored. Not so confident with the Windows file system checking after that.

I'm a fan of spinrite

Wes

You can have any sort of raid and still lose data. There are many scenarios why one could lose data, examples:

1) Disk failure 2) House fire 3) Accidental deletion

Raid does not protect against possibilities 2 and 3. Only versioned offsite backup does.

RAID will also happily protect corrupted data, so if the system pukes and corrupts stuff RAID won't help.

Well, it's not truly inexpensive, but Spinrite 6.0 from Gibson Research

is the gold standard for disk repairs and data recovery like that.

About $60 last I checked - and it can be run as a diagnostic on a less intensive level. If your hard drive is only starting to fail, the periodic sweeps will start showing bad blocks recovered and saved

- the files that fail first might be photographs or stuff you don't look at often, but when the OS or Boot sectors go, it suddenly flat-lines...

If there are still signs of life and it's at all possible to extract the good data, move it to a working sector and flag the bad sector as bad, Spinrite will do it.

(Only problem I have is their FreeDos bootable CD won't work with the latest 64-bit machines. I'll have to get on their support newsgroups and see if someone has a new boot CD that works.)

Note that sometimes it's a thermal fault - the drive starts going away as it heats up. Open the case and aim the air conditioner output right at the hard drive.

Worst case, you double-wrap the drive in a static bag for static protection, and a Ziploc for a moisture block, and freeze it overnight. Then let it "thaw" in the refrigerator before plugging it in and trying again, and see above about keeping it chilled as you repair and then get the data off.

-->--

Absolutely. Take your hard drive off line immediately untily you're ready to do the recovery otherwise you may worsen the damage.

The program to download is DFSee.

It costs $50 to register, but it's completely functional as downloaded. The directions are difficult to follow unless you're a hard drive techie - what you're really paying for is the right to have the software author walk you through the recovery step by step. I've used it twice. It's paid for itself.

What he'll have you do is have the program read the raw data off the dying disk sector by sector and put it onto a good hard drive where the DFSee software will then recover it as files. With NTFS you're odds of getting data back are pretty good. I did it with Fat32 and was pretty successful considering that it isn't as robust.

RWL

Why does freezing work? Do you run into problems with condensation on the cold drive?

RWL

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Yes -- a *frequent* backup. Raid 5 is good for avoiding corruption of data from a failing drive (I'm using Sun's zfs software RAID with "raidz2" level protection.)

But -- if you get hit by a virus, or someone breaks in through a security hole, they can corrupt or delete the files and as far as the RAID system is concerned, they are perfect -- they are the version of the file last written to disk. Just because they don't contain what you expect them to contain does not mean that the RAID system failed -- just your anti-virus and other security items.

Good Luck, DoN.

Failing electronics often work better cold. The air inside the disk chamber will be expanding as the drive warms up thus expelling air.

Wes