Excessive heat will get it too. My laptop drive wont come up after Vegas. Being in forensic data recovery I already know Jims trick of slamming it to get it to spin up.

Has worked for me all the way back to that 10 meg Rodime drive I had.

Sorry to hear, hope it works out. My site/work stuff is on a seperate drive, course does'nt mean it cant fail.

ronnie

MrYum, the other thing about ghost I really like is it's ability to handle larger drives... you can take your old 80 meg drive and ghost it onto a nice new 250 meg drive, and it handles making all the extra space available without any data loses on the way. It is actually fast enough that I would consider it an acceptable way to back up a full hard drive to another drive on a regular basis (rather than disks or tape).

Good luck to anyone with hard drive problems, I know it's a pain.

Alex

Macs…

Drag your home folder to another drive like a firewire drive and all your documents, bookmarks, cookies, settings, everything is backed up except your applications and system.

Use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your whole drive to another drive, like a firewire drive, that you can even boot from and it everything will be just the was it was at the time of cloning including your account with all its documents, bookmarks, cookies, settings, applications, system, etc.

Yup, I run mirrored 120 gig drives in my main system...about 40% used...my other machine here has 3 drives of varying sizes. All are 'ghosted' to a single 120 gig external usb drive with room to spare |thumb

Agreed, best of luck to anyone with drive problems. And whatever you do...once you get up and running again...put some kind of seemless backup system in place. We rely on these machines too much to do otherwise. Personally, for the cost/benefits...I'm a big fan of Ghost :)

I'm glad this post was a wakeup call to some others. Yesterday I spent the day backing all my data on DVD's (I think 14 of them) then I deleted what I didn't need and moved everything to one of my SATA drives, and formatted the other.

I have norton ghost now set up to do a complete backup of my data drive to the backup drive every morning at 3am and iterm backups every 3 hours.

Once I'm done installing programs, I will be doing restore disks with Norton Ghost that has windows, service packs, and all my programs stored so if my primary drive ever fries, I can restore all that from a bootable disk. Plus I'm having ghost make backups of my primary drive onto the storage drive too.

This is the first time I've ever had a set routine on my computer of doing backups. I guess if all 3 drives fried I'd be screwed, but the chances of that happening, hopefully, is small.

I am totally diggin this new operating system too, I never thought a 2.8 AMD Semptron chip would be faster than a pentium 4 3.4 chip, but it is, quite a bit faster. My anti virus program started its complete scan this morning, and before when it was doing that, i'd slow me down so much on everything else, I'd shut it off. I didn't notice any slowdown at all this morning, and I was installing programs, printer drives, checking email, and checking stats all at once while it was going, lol. Also I use ACDSee alot, and when I open a file full of content, it generates the thumbs a lot faster too.

This has been a huge hassle, and cost me a few $$$, but in the long run my data is much safer, and i have a better system.

**************
What fried my system?


It looks like when I hot plugged in the card reader for my camera into the front USB port, I had static which shorted through the piece of SHIT case I had. We think that was the final spark that took down the mother board, which took down the processor, power supply, and my trackball mouse (go figure) but NOT the drives, printers, keyboard, or the video card thankfully. Since I have previously fried a power supply in this computer, he feels the motherboard was falty from the get go, and I tend to agree with him.

He suggesed one of those hubs that you have that plugged into your usb port, then if you hot plug, plug into the hub, a LOT less chance of that happening. Another thing to consider if you are like me and hot plug stuff into your usb drives alot. |thumb

Only if at least one drive is located in a different building. Otherwise the odds on fire/theft/flood/hurricane/etc destroying all three is too high for you to feel "safe". If these happen insurance will cover the cost of your equipment (hopefully), but will not cover the cost and hardship of data loss. As a spot of "overkill" one of my backups is in a different country!

A cavet on my computer being faster...except for video editing. We just ran a head to head test using Vegas Video, and the pentium 4 won hands down. But since I don't render video on my machine, and i'm more of a multi-tasking fool, it works for me. :)

No, my backups are all in the same building, and you are right, fire and theft could be issues, although I live in a cinder block home, so fire isn't as much as a possiblity as it would otherwise be, we thankfully have no hurricanes or tornadoes either here. One of the reasons I love Nevada. |thumb

Oh fine...veeeeery nice...throw that whole rough weather thing is our faces again. So, we get a little wind sometimes |hurricane

Glad you got yourself a backup system in place V...it really is cheap peace of mind. I don't keep a copy offsite either and probably should. But figure if I ever do have to bail outta here in a hurry...that usb drive and the Ghost startup disk are being tossed in a bag as I run out the door |hurricane

I actually love using that smilie :D

Been there, done that...learned the hard way. I have backups of my backups now. You can never be too safe.

Well, it looks like it's going to cost around $2800 to recover the data on my hard drive. |cry|

With that being said, I now have 2 new hard drives with one running as the mirror. While I do occasionally worry about fire/flooding/etc., I have to have both machines in the same building. I guess I'll take my chances...

All day has been spent reinstalling programs I have the cd's for, searching on line for others, redoing my settings to make my desktop "comfy" and starting to download a massive about of stuff off my server to my hard drive. Fun-Fun!

Maybe I'll be able to start doing some reviews for Click 4Sex Fun sometime in this decade. BTW, for all you submitters that sent me your free sites for Click 4Sex Fun in the last two weeks, they're all gone! Please feel free to resubmit. Sorry!

Ouch! That IS pricey |shocking|

Glad you're getting things settled in again...good luck on all the tweaking. Guess the upside is you'll have a nice fast clean system again when it's all done :)

Yes, it's WAY to pricey for me but seeing as how my kid's digital pictures where all on that hard drive, I'll have to eventually fork over the money to recover it all. |sad|

... and yes, my new hard drive is super fast! :)

good luck
 

http://quetek.com/ go here you can use this utility to recover all that data off your hard drive

Thanks bater! I'll go check it out. |thumb

I went through this awhile back too.
Now I have 2 mirrored HD on two different machines, plus CD/Dvd back ups in 2 places. One at my house and one at the cabin. You simply can't have enough back ups.