OT: Freezing Hard Drives

Just had the same happen to me. My 40gb Fujitsu drive died. There's a well known problem it seems with certain models of which mine was one. Totally dead as in no electrical activity and the platters wouldn't even spin up. A sit in the freezer didn't immediately work but a while later it span up for long enough to get the data off and then died again just after we'd finished that. It may have been something about passing back up through a critical temperature range during which it worked. Anyway, a very lucky escape as all my accounts and engine development data and software was on it and it turned out the backup disks had been overwritten due to an oversight. That's the third or fourth time I've managed to get my data off dead or dying drives but rather than push my luck I've got a proper backup system installed again now via an InCD formatted cd-rw which holds about 550mb - enough to store the critical data. Losing reinstallable programs is the least of my worries.

Dave Baker - Puma Race Engines

"How's life Norm?" "Not for the squeamish, Coach" (Cheers, 1982)

Sorta like the opposite of bootstrapping batteries, huh?

Have you considered installing a surplus RAID array with some big hard storage?

?ViewItem&category=39974&item=2746012008 Remember what they say about keeping all your eggs in one basket...

A simple mirror program will keep redundent backups/copies real time

Gunner

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!" -- Ben Franklin

Back in the stone age, you used to get stiction, where the heads would actually stick to the platter(s) and the motor didn't have torque enough to start the drive up. The fix was to tap both top and bottom of the drive with your knuckles, install the thing and hopefully get your data removed to a different brand of drive. The fix, IIRC, was the factory used some kind of very thin lubricant or surface coating on the platter to keep that from happening. These were the cheap-ass drives, the expensive ones parked the heads on power-off and lifted them clear of the surface. Happened to me a bunch of times when working PC support.

Stan

Stan,

Yep, it was known as the 'Compaq prayer' - hold the hard disk beween the palms of your two hands (as in prayer) and flick you hands downwards thus starting the disk spinning and unsticking the heads, and pray it works if the client has no backup as was usual.

Andrew Mawson Bromley, Kent, UK

You're not be as secure as you think- a cd-rw drive can be finicky- it may only read a cd-rw it wrote. This can be a big problem when the power supplies fries and zaps both the cd drive and the hard drive and a new cd drive (or a different machine) won't read your old back up disc.

A Zip drive, on the other hand, is truly portable.

-Carl

On Thu, 07 Aug 2003 00:04:32 GMT, Carl Byrns wrote:

Carl, I beg to differ. As CD ROM and CDRW are established standards they ARE universal. Only problem is with using UDF Packet writing - and even there you are VERY close to safe. UDF packet writing writes to the CD like to a floppy, and makes it readable on any CD drive, as long as the OS continues to be compatible with the UDF reader which is embedded in the disk. If not using UDF, the disk can be read on any drive capable of reading multisession CDRW - which is any CD ROM or DVD ROM drive built in the last 4 years or so. ZIP drives are NOT a standard, and can ONLY be read on a Zip drive. Not only that, but they are STRICTLY magnetic, and as such are VOLATILE. ALL magnetic media deteriorates with age. Deterioration increases with changes in temperature, and movement. Total data loss can be induced by magnet field fluctuation or impact. The drive can also be accidentally rewritten. This is also true of CDRW. CD R can NOT be overwritten, and is the ONLY method of backup that can be legally accepted as proof in forensic accounting. Cost wize, CR R cannot be beat. Disks can be purchaced for significantly less than $0.50 each. A ZIP disk is still worth something much closer to $20 each. DDS2 tapes are still over $20 each, and require a compatible tape drive AND SOFTWARE to read. A tape prepared and written by Veritas or MS Backup can not be read by CA software and vise versa. Tape is the LEAST secure method of tape backup practical in today's world. This leaves out Floppy disk, as

1.44MB is NOT practical.

CD-Rs are getting pretty close to being impractical these days for backup. I use a DVD-R, with CD-Rs mostly used for file interchange (don't bother returning it). That was always a hassle with ZIPs.

The new generation of DVD-R (blue laser) will be even better. The current ones cannot store as much as typical video DVDs because the latter are usually dual layer with 9G or so on them. The DVD-Rs only hold half as much (4.7G).

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

A backup you have not verified on another device is not a backup.

Always, always do so.

Have you thought of installing a RAID mirroring system so you always have duplicate drives? I finally installed one after losing data one too many times. I've never heard of the freezing trick, I'll have to remember it.

John

Please note that my return address is wrong due to the amount of junk email I get. So please respond to this message through the newsgroup.

Even so it should still last a few sessions, at least for me :^).

john

Please note that my return address is wrong due to the amount of junk email I get. So please respond to this message through the newsgroup.

Good point, how do you know your backup was written correctly? I'm not sure why it needs to be checked on a different device? I guess just to verify that there's no quirks that only that device can read.

What I'd like to have is a program that will do an automated binary file check for all the files backed up. You don't know any programs like that do you?

John

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Then let the moths out of your wallet and buy a decent drive. They are only about $50 US now.

Dave Baker scribed in :

Dave, you really need to do those backups properly as it's partof your business. CD-RW does not last very long compared to tape and CD-R I strongly recommend making a CD-R at least once a week. and store some of them offsite if you can. addiitionally, if you have or can get another computer, network them and mirror to the secondary one.

Here at work I run a backup once a week, in a FULL/partial cycle that uses 9 tapes. 3 full, and 3 weekly partials. so at any time I have month before last + weekly , last month and weekly increments, and THIS month and weekly increments. this covers possible tape failure pretty well.

for those running Win98SE and older, you can clone to a new drive without having to reinstall ANYTHING. email me for details, guess I should make a web page some day.... it may also work for later WniOS's, but I avoid those...

swarf, steam and wind

-- David Forsyth -:- the email address is real /"\

\ / ASCII Ribbon campaign against HTML E-Mail > - - - - - - -> X If you receive email saying "Send this to everyone you know," / \ PLEASE pretend you don't know me.

Exactly. It's more common with tape drives that they can get out of whack in such a way that they will only read tapes they've made, though I've seen a cd-writer that did this.

I use md5sum, a utility that comes with most linux distributions. However, I don't think it's available for windows.

What about backing up to a harddrive? It would sure be fast. I would assume if you loose the HD due to surges you could replace the controller board and retrieve the data. Or just use a removeable drive bay.

John

Please note that my return address is wrong due to the amount of junk email I get. So please respond to this message through the newsgroup.

Hmm ... what brand drive and disks? I'm using a Yamaha drive (8/4/24) on a Sun unix system, and "K-hypermedia" 24X CD-R discs) I've been writing at the 8x rate, of course.

So far, it has been readable on every CD-ROM drive that I've tried it on on unix boxen, and on the CD-ROM drive in an old IBM 760XD Thinkpad, and on a pentium running Windows-NT 4.0, and the only time I have *not* been able to read a disk created by it was on a friend's quite recent vintage HP laptop. It seems that the problem is in very recent Windows CD-ROM drives.

That, I will agree with.

Enjoy, DoN.

After several disasters and the realisation that to reload a backup you anyway have to reload the operating system, I now use Norton Ghost - it starts from windows but runs in DOS so no 'in use files' are missed, and it writes an image to a CD that is directly bootable. I can do a full 4 gig backup and check in 30 mins and to restore a PC takes only the CD's it wrote - no other dependancies. With a fast CD reader I can restore in under

15 minutes. Compare that with re-installing windows, then re-installing the backup software, then reloading your back up, only to find it missed all the important files as they were in use by windows ! (yep been there )

Andrew Mawson Bromley, Kent, UK