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I've been trying to recover data from a hard drive from my mothers PC (needless to say, she has been useless about doing backups, or leaving the machine turned on overnight so the auto backup will run). The PC was around 7 years old, so a catastrophic disc crash was hardly unexpected: a couple of weeks ago it failed, and I went down and sorted her out with a new PC, bringing the dead drive back to London with me.
Dead hard drives can often be temporarily returned to life (even when disc repair utilities fail) by getting them really cold. So I have spent the last 14 hours putting the drive in the freezer (well-wrapped in plastic, with dessicant gel, and just the leads sticking out). After an hour, the drive is removed, wrapped in whatever comes to hand to keep it cold (in this case, a large pack of frozen chips {US - french fries}) and a towel, plugged into my PC, and files copied. This works for about 15 minutes before the heat builds up in the drive and it becomes unusable again ... so the process has to be repeated. Finally, I think I've rescued just about everything there is to be rescued.
But it is undoubtedly a very silly way to spend a day!
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night devoid of stars." Martin Luther King
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
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Would those be oven chips?
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
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Or are they the microwavable variety?
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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Yes, I'm afraid so. (oven, that is).
Sitting redundantly in the freezer for the past few months - since a severe talking-to from my doctor, and having to take cholesterol-reducing meds, has made me a bit scared of using them up !
[Updated on: Wed, 25 October 2006 22:23]
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night devoid of stars." Martin Luther King
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That's very enterprising of you, NW. So many people would just give up.
Best wishes,
David
[Updated on: Wed, 25 October 2006 22:23] |
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Enterprising? possibly.
Stubborn and bloodymindedly stupid ? Almost certainly ...
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night devoid of stars." Martin Luther King
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I was told that I was being bloodymindedly stupid and to stop making absurd suggestions when I suggested that someone do the same thing with a failed, non-backed up disk at the ISP I used to work for. I was a little upset, because actually the amount of time it would have taken to have a go at something like that was several orders of magnitude less than the total amount of time it ended up wasting for customers (of which there were several thousand, all of whom had to re-upload their web sites). The system administrator threw the disk away without even trying.
David
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I think you were right to be upset !
Especially if - as in both your case at the ISP, and my case with my mothers HD, one feels some kind of duty towards other peoples data. While it is undoubtedly true that *everyone* ought to have *several* backups of their *own * data, people generally don't seem to (unless they are or have been professionally involved in some way). Most people don't realise just how reliant they have become on PCs until they suffer data loss.
In my mothers case, all the "work" stuff was backed up in that when she finishes work on a chapter she e-mails it to herself at her work address ... even so, there is always a *lot* of stuff like letters to banks, hospitals etc which it would be a real nuisance not to be able to refer to occasionally.
Actually, I was a bit suprised at just how much data turned out to be rescuable ... around 85% of the "My Documents ... " stuff (I didn't bother with programs).
And I'm peturbed that the system admin "threw the disc away" - I would rather hope that anything like that would have been sent for professional destruction. Certainly, that's what I used to do with obsolete machines and dead discs from the network I ran at work ... although in that the system contained stuff like customers credit card numbers I was always particularly careful.
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night devoid of stars." Martin Luther King
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At this ISP the maxim was, "It's the customer's problem." If a customer complained about something, then the support team would try and fix it, but there was no mechanism for anticipating problems in advance. It was also in the terms and conditions that we didn't keep backups (some servers had RAID, but by no means all, and that is not a real backup anyway) and so the policy was, "If the disk fails, don't worry -- just reinstall and let the customer have a heart attack if they don't have a backup." The management in charge never had to deal with the implications of this (beyond a few pounds' savings per server for fewer hard disks) and the technical team didn't either (they had the support team to fend off annoyed customers). We in support always had a very nasty time whenever a disk failed, though -- thousands of extra emails a day, plus constant phone calls, faxes etc.
>I'm peturbed that the system admin "threw the disc away" - I would rather hope that anything like that would have been sent for professional destruction. Certainly, that's what I used to do with obsolete machines and dead discs from the network I ran at work ... although in that the system contained stuff like customers credit card numbers I was always particularly careful.
The disks did not have anything tremendously sensitive on them, apart, of course, from people's (non-secure) web sites. I was being metaphorical when I said that they threw the disk away -- many of the servers were in America and couldn't be physically accessed except by remote technicians. In that case the disks, as far as I know, were returned to the hosting company. If they were working they would probably have been re-used in other companies' servers; I assume that the hosting company knew what to do with the non-functional ones. No-one, either at home or in America, ever bothered to try and restore data from disks that would not immediately boot.
David
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