Fried Hard Drive

Two weeks ago my 150gig Western Digital Raptor hard drive died. She was an amazing beast of an HD. From intense gaming to web surfing, never once did she complain. Loyal to the bitter end, she never let me down despite any of my drucken follies. Yes, through my careless neglect, she succumbed to over heating due to extreme high temps in my case. How could I have been so unthoughtfull? How could I have not noticed two of my case fans were inoperable?

Rest in peace my love. Lost but not forgotten are all of my recipes, photo's and other irreplaceable software I failed to backup since May of 2008. Gone is the American Brown Ale recipe I created, of which I have no record of, but only a half keg remains. Same for the Pale Ale, a cascade delight, of which only one keg remains.

As in life, the old is reborn anew.............

Donate your hard drives organs, a stirplate is in need!!!!!!

*sniff*... that's just beautiful man, just beautiful. Oooh hey that enclosure would make a wicked stirplate box!


Oh wait, that *is* the stirplate box, isn't it?

+1 for using the case from the HD.

-1 for not making it firewire powered...

Great Idea what to do with my old ext...

B

How did it act when it died? I had a drive at work that went bad and windows could nto recognize. I loaded some recovery software and managed to read the file I needed before trashing the drive (I already own way too many magnets). Now I don't toss any of them before trying the recovery software.

Take the hard drive out of the case. Hook it up to a working computer on the secondary ide connection. Make sure your bad hard drive jumper is set to cable select. Plug in one of the extra power connectors to your bad hard drive and turn everything on. If you have trouble getting the computer to boot dont hook up the secondary ide connection to the hard drive until the computer has booted. Just make sure the power is connected to the HD, boot the computer and then hook up the secondary ide connection.

See if the computer recognizes it and if it becomes available within "My Computer" then follow the instructions below.


When the black command box comes up type in the command

xcopy e:\*.* c:\backup\*.* /h /e /r /c /k/ y

"e" is the drive letter that window recognizes the drive as(if at all).

This will start complete backup of the bad drive. You must have space for all of the data on the good computer though...

From the looks of the pick this hard drive is in an enclosure and it could be the enclosure is bad in someway. The drive could actually still be good...

If this does not work you could send off to drivesavers.com but could get really expensive.

You could also freeze the drive in a zip lock bag for a day or so then try this again. Sounds crazy and is a last resort but has worked for me before... I didnt believe it either but it worked with a clanking hard drive...

Drivesavers will tell you not to but if your not going to send it off to them then its worth it as a last resort.

Hope this helps....

You have to go to start > run

then you can type in the command below

xcopy e:\*.* c:\backup\*.* /h /e /r /c /k/ y

Jmac, did you miss the part where he's already destroyed the drive and took the magnets out?

EvilTOJ said:

Jmac, did you miss the part where he's already destroyed the drive and took the magnets out?

Click to expand...

Clearly, you underestimate the power of the DOS command prompt.

yermej said:

Clearly, you underestimate the power of the DOS command prompt.

Click to expand...

That's possible?

It's simple. Just go back in time to just before the drive was used to build a stir plate, and THEN try to do that backup.

Jmac said:

You have to go to start > run

then you can type in the command below

xcopy e:\*.* c:\backup\*.* /h /e /r /c /k/ y

Click to expand...

I have used this in the past with other defunk drives with success. But it didn't work with this internal sata raptor. For what I paid for this drive vs. what the cost would be to send it in to a place like drivesavers.com it didn't make much sense for me. Thank you for the suggestions just the same.

The encloser used for the stir plate is not an hard drive encloser. The encloser I used for the stir plate was from a garage sale find. It is, or in this case, was an xbox 360 HD player that I got for $15 at said garage sale.

yermej said:

Clearly, you underestimate the power of the DOS command prompt.

Click to expand...

Classic....

bad coffee said:

+1 for using the case from the HD.

-1 for not making it firewire powered...

Great Idea what to do with my old ext...

B

Click to expand...

I thought about firewire. But in the end, I decided it would be more convenient going the cell phone adapter route.