Hard Drive Failed - Lost EVERYTHING!
 

For the last 4 years or so, my computer has been a laptop. I pretty much used it for everything - homework, games, LAN parties, etc.

Just last night/this morning (2am), the hard drive failed. I lost everything on it. I am going to contact a Data Recovery Firm tomorrow for a quote. If it isn't too extreme, then my Dad said we will have them do it. The drive had all my homework assignments, music, personal files, and a large amount of family pictures (whenever the Digital Camera needed room to be made, I was always the one to download the pictures and clear the memory stick, and thus, many of the pictures were on my computer, and my computer only).

This was most unfortunate, because I had just bought a new computer and was in the process of building it (a desktop). I am using it right now as a matter of fact. However, had the computer been done, I would have transferred all my files over and none would have been lost (I was planning to format and reload everything on the laptop anyway). However, the drive failed not even a day before the computer was done.

Needless to say, I'm pretty disappointed.

Anyone else ever had a hard drive failure?

I have, a few times. I'm surprised that your laptop hard drive lasted as long as it did. I use mine A LOT, so I replace the hard drive once a year or so. I know that's kind of extreme, but it's cheaper than the down time. Besides, hard drives are pretty inexpensive now. I also do regular backups of my important files, but you still have to re-install everything when the drive goes belly up, so avoiding it is worth it.

I had 2, but they were our own faults, on laptop drive faild when my wife slammed the screen shut with a bit too much force, one desktop drive failled when I accidently stuck my finger to the pcb when power was on. I was installing a fan with power on, not a very smat idea, lol

In total we've probably have at least 8 hard drive failures. But that's not bad considering we've had 30+ hard drives in the past 15 or so years. I myself have had one or two go bad.

My dad has had some luck recovering files himself with some "professional" software he has "downloaded." I can ask him tomorrow for the details.

Do yourself a favor and get an external (USB or Firewire) harddrive. Then, periodically make disk images of everything. Most disk imaging software has the ability to boot off the CD and read the data from the backup to completely restore everything to a brand new drive.

Or, use the external drive to make backups of whatever you think is important. This can be done using MSBackup (assuming you use XP) via a batch file so it's just a one-click maintenance thing.

I build custom computers and my take on hard drives isn't if they will fail, but when. Not only that, but if you have anything of value on the drive then you need to factor in murphies law. This is why I recommend RAID drives. Get yourself a network drive with built in mirror RAID or RAID 5. It's just not worth losing your data. Almost all of us will go threw this at least once in our life. Only noobs let it happen again. Get yourself a RAID.

You said you just bought a new computer. Make sure that sucker has a least 2 hard drives and that they are mirrored. People can talk big all day long about keeping backups. Thats all great, but in the real world very few have the time or energy to remember to back everything up every time they get new data. Having some redundancy will at least prevent loss from an inevitable drive failure.

On you're laptop that failed, is it just not booting anymore, have you tried putting the drive into another computer to see if you can recover the data? What brand is the drive? Some companies are cooler about helping you recover your data.

I had one fail as well. It was quite odd though. I think the motherboard and/or processor failed, causing the hard drive to fail. The hard drive was so hot it started to melt the plastic on the bottom of it.

That sounds like a power supply failure to me. Those buggers can take the whole pc with them. Power supply is the most under estimated component in your computer.

I have been fortunate to have never had a failure in the two years i have had this computer

It sucks.

i used to run a stripe raid on my computer (raid 0) and 1 disk crashed so all the data was gone..(maxtor disk) i invested in 4 disks and got a raid 10 system. Stupid enough two discs failed right after eachother. Again maxtor discs.

Now i run a WD raptor 10k sata disc, they seem to be more reliable. they come with a 60month warrantee as well.

There are several software providers that make recovery software. As long as the disk is seeking, spinning and the heads aren't crashed, you have got a good change the data is still there.

Good choice! I also use the Raptors, but in RAID0. I know if one goes, all data is lost, but that's why I make frequent backups to an internal IDE drive and also to a couple of USB external drives.

Yeah, the raptors are the best sata/ide disks available. too bad the access time gets a twist from raid 0.

speed of a raid system depends pretty much on the controller used. however; the onboard intel ICHxR seem to preform pretty good for desktop use/applications.

In most cases the hdd is the reason why computers are feeling slow.. Can't have enough speed in the disks IMO.. (nor stability) what are you using for backup? I'm pretty keen on Acronis.

I'm still using a really old AMD64 (socket 754) chipset right now, but not sure on the SATA chipset - IIRC, it's on of the older VIA chipsets. I'm planning on upgrading soon, but really, it is still fast enough for what I use it for.

I can't wait until flash memory gets low enogh for solid state drives. Access time will really be improved. And no moving parts and no magnetic media will be nice.

I don't back up to a disk image; the last time I did, the software I was using had trouble restoring to my SATA RAID0 set. Besides, I like to reformat every year or so to clean out the cobwebs anyway. So, I made some backup scripts to use with MSBackup that will back up all my important files at one click and saves it to another drive with a dated filename. Works well. :)

Thats what I thought as well, but it seemed to check out ok...

Brian, you might want to consider the AMD Athon64 X2 4200+. Its a AM2 socket, so it will require a new motherboard. I would recommend the
nFORCE4M-A HT2000. That, in combination with a nVidia GeForce 6600 OC. I have that in the computer I'm using right now, and its probably the fasted computer I've ever used. Of course, I have it slightly over clocked, but it still runs under 30* C. I could probably go up alot more, but don't want to push it.

Yeah, I will definitely go with an AMD CPU, but was thinking of an ATI GPU since AMD now owns ATI (figure they would work well together). When it gets closer to purchase time, I'll be doing a lot of research. Thanks for the tip though.