Great day and a crappy day at the same time

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FSR402

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My SWMBO went out of town yesterday so I figured that I would bust out a brew.
Looked at my hops and yeast and figured a nice mild would be good to make. Seeing how I had the hops and yeast for it and the grain bill would be cheap so as not to tap into any funds that I should not tap into.

She left for Chi-town at 10:30am, I was at the LHBS by 10:45, got the grains, went home and set up the brew tower in the driveway. Crushed the grains with my new BC Mill (got it for X-mas :D ) and was mashing by 12:00.
The brew went great, hit my temps right on. I ended up boiling off a little more then I wanted to so I had to top-off with a gallon of bottled water into the fermenter. Not a big deal being it was a 10 gallon batch. I need to mark my kettle so that I can prevent this next time.
When I was all done I missed my SG by .002 in the +. So my effi was a little better then what I figured it would be. So all good there.
After I was all done I went into my office to input the SG into Beersmith.
Then was when it all went down hill fast.
My screen was in a black DOS mode. And it said that the hard disk was bad and to hit F2 to reset.
While I was brewing my PC crashed.. :(
What a said ending. I have lost all my beer stuff and my porn.
 
That's why I have a 2gig thumb drive that I put my stuff on, my brewing pc is old and I know it's just a matter of time....
 
If you have anything important on that drive, time to look into Disk recovery.

Basically you ship it off somewhere, they reassemble it in a clean room, and then burn all your files to dvds for you. Costs between 100-200 dollars for the average joe hard drive, probably more than that if the dead drive is 500 gig or something.
 
Yeah there was a lot of really good porn.
I see that some of the PC's here at work have the same kind of drive. So I'm going to pull it out and hook it up here as a slave and see if I can get anything off it. If not, well, I'll deal with that later.
I have another PC to use but no Beersmith on it. and of course the email with the key code was on the PC that crashed and I kept thinking "I need to back thid thing up, I'll do it tomorrow." Well, it's to late now.
 
If you can hear it "spin" inside, e.g. if you power the computer on, hold the drive between your fingers and can feel movement, then you might have some luck with the slave-drive method that you described. Most often, though, if it's bad enough to give you the message you described, then the "slave" method won't work because it's a physical problem.

Just a heads up, if the drive isn't spinning, or more importantly, if when you power on you can hear a "click-click-click"ing noise from the hard drive, I would NOT power it up any more than you have to. If it's broken in this way, then trying to connect it here and there can actually lose more of your data.

As a tech, recovery is one thing I will not touch, no matter for who or for how much money. The pros know how to handle it, so I let 'em. :)
 
chriso said:
As a tech, recovery is one thing I will not touch, no matter for who or for how much money. The pros know how to handle it, so I let 'em. :)

could you imagine the phone conversation, "yes, i'd like you to fix my computer, I've lost a lot of great porn." :D :ban:
 
I have heard of this technique, and have heard of it being successful for others.

I've tried it twice and got no results. Both hard drives appeared to be completely toast, only a clean room could've fixed them. Both hard drives went in the trash, ultimately. In retrospect, I wish I could've afforded data recovery at the time. I hate losing files.
 
chriso said:
I have heard of this technique, and have heard of it being successful for others.

I've tried it twice and got no results. Both hard drives appeared to be completely toast, only a clean room could've fixed them. Both hard drives went in the trash, ultimately. In retrospect, I wish I could've afforded data recovery at the time. I hate losing files.

I have no money for that right now either. Hell, I have no money for a new drive and OS for that matter. :(
 
Your OS is on your factory reinstall CD, you shouldn't have to buy a new OS unless your PC is a custom-build or second-hand or something..... I hear ya, though, that s*** always happens to me at the worst time!!

Sorry again for your troubles, dude!
 
The freezing method should be a last resort. Put the drive in a plastic bag first, to minimize moisture in the drive. But by the time you recover the files and turn the computer off, the drive will be done.

If you don't have an OS cd, most online computer component dealers have OEM copies you can buy if you are buying a hardware component (hard drive). It'd be about $151 shipped for 160GB drive (Retail) and Windows XP Home disc with one liscence. If you do have a OS disc the drive is about $60. (All from NEWEGG.com)

Just to get up and running, you can download Ubuntu (linux OS, free) and burn it to CD. Put the CD into the CD Rom and boot the computer, run the LIVE CD. This will give you an OS that can open up the files if the drive is accessable at all, without actually installing the OS to the drive. It may be able to read the files and allow you to burn them off onto discs. If this sounds like something you want to try, PM me and I'll send you my phone # and can help walk you through it.
 
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