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RIP ...Hard Drive
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Posted by: AtariFX
So one of my five hard drives started making ridiculous noises. A series of loud clicks in a rhythmic fashion. I rebooted and the PC stalled when loading the IDE devices. I figured that an old 30gb western digi died but come to find out it was one of my 120GB 7200RPM +8MB Cache Hard disks! I had so much on this damn thing. Does anyone REPAIR these things. I really can't loose any of this info. I tried the drive in another PC, tried messing with the jumpers, tried it all. I want to take it apart and see if I can find out anything. Does WD have some repair manual out there. I'm really freakin out here. This shouldn't have happened.
Posted by: uh...ok
There are a lot of professional recovery services out there, but most of them will cost you an arm and a leg. If that data wasn't absolutely crucial or expensive, it probably wouldn't be worth it.
Posted by: redwench
dont do it yourself, until its the last thing you do before tossing it in the trash. data retrieval is horrendously expensive. if you have data that exists nowhere else, is vital, and cannot be regenerated, that is what youll have to do. were talking thousands of dollars here.
since its an 8mb cache, its still under warranty. email wd and see if they have an idea. they might (and thats a mighty big might) be able to copy it over to a new drive. i doubt it though.
you can and probably should take it into a local shop (competent, please) just in case its something they can fix. wouldn't hope for much there. if the data is replaceable, dont bother, just toss it...er send it to wd for a new one.
now we come to cracking the thing open. this will void your warranty, you cant get it replaced if you do this. i am not familiar with the details, so i cant tell you what to do here. I can tell you what to avoid. DUST, HAIR, anything like that. if you can access a clean room, do so. very powerful magnets are in there, so anything you use will become magnetized. now, does it fail to spin or fail to read? if the former, look at the drive mechanism. if the latter, check the heads and attachments. [insert technical instructions here]
if by some miracle you or a local shop gets it to work, immediately copy the entire drive onto other drives. it probably wont work for long. if you decide youre going to crack it open, buy a new drive first, so you can copy quickly.
ill even toss my 2 cents in here, next time you have important stuff on your hard drive, just copy it over to another drive. will take 2 min at the most, and youll be able to access it unless the entire comp goes up in flames. and i actually do follow my own advice, i have a backup of everything but music, games, and windows on my second drive.
Posted by: uh...ok
Backing up usually isn't the hard part... it's updating all the time that is. 
Unless I made some kind of macro or used some kind of program that copies any new files I created in Folder X into Folder Y every night.
Posted by: redwench
you forget, this is a hard drive, not a cd. just trash whats been backed up, and redo the whole thing. even if its 20 gigs, it wont take long. just make a copy of anything you want to keep, put it in a folder marked "backup" or something, and every week or day, copy the whole thing to the other drive. a little bit of planning and organization ahead of time would make it quite simple to do.
Posted by: uh...ok
No, I didn't forget.  It's just that I barely have time to sleep sometimes, and yea, while trashing and redoing the whole thing is less pain in terms of work-I-do (which is what I'm planning to do when I [maybe] go home this summer and can only bring my laptop home, but most my stuff is on my desktop), copying gigs of information still takes a good while - not to mention a lot of chugging on the part of my computer (and a lot more than 2 minutes).
Though I would think that it does pay off in case something bad DOES happen.... probably could afford to at least make it a weekly thing.
Posted by: redwench
heh, do it during dinner. ^^
Posted by: taco_fox
Speaking of backing up, is there any kind of program that allows you to sync two folders? ie, when something in D:\stuff has been modified, the program backs it up to E:\backup ?
Actually, I know there's probably programs that do this, but I guess I'm looking for freeware.
Posted by: uh...ok
That's exactly what I was talking about, radar. 
I'm sure I could write one that kind of did that, except it'd be in Scheme.
Posted by: AtariFX
I do know under win2k server you can set another hard disk to mirror another so that data is stored in both disks as soon as data is modified.
Too bad I wasn't using that.
I emailed WD and hven't gotten a reply yet. They must be able to do something esp. since the drive is brand spankin new.
Posted by: Null Actor
They can give you a replacement, or possibly make suggestions, but don't go thinking they'll retrieve any data for you, cause they won't.
Posted by: AtariFX
I just talked to a buddy of mine and he said if you can hear anything rattling around inside the drive, it's pretty much done. I guess the heads may have fallen off. Oh well.
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