My hard drive! NUUU!

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Elvin
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My hard drive! NUUU!

Post by Elvin » February 20th, 2009, 1:48 am

A virus left my harddrive unresponsive, I lost 2 lab reports (one of them 14 pages long) and all my game save files (like a hundred hours of my life more or less). A family friend put in a new harddrive, and after 30 min of trying to redownload all my programs, I get yet another virus of the 4 pop-ups per second when you're browsing online variety. Things've settled down but I was seriously depressed for a while.

So, how many of you own external harddrives? How often (and how much of) do you back up your files?

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Re: My hard drive! NUUU!

Post by oldwrench » February 20th, 2009, 2:52 am

I have several external drive, and I back up some of the irreplaceable stuff. Sakura could help you do a better job of backup than I could. She's really good at that stuff. You might want to up your security online. I don't know what antivirus you use, but it isn't working to well. One program that will aid in protecting against threats is Threatfire. Its a free program that runs along with your antivirus. just search for it with google, I use it on all my computers.
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Re: My hard drive! NUUU!

Post by Elvin » February 20th, 2009, 3:07 am

I have Norton 09. It blocked the first time the virus attacked, but my friend went and downloaded it again before I could stop him :sob: . I had a few of my documents backed up a few months ago, and a second harddrive where I kept some of my larger folders.

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Re: My hard drive! NUUU!

Post by oldwrench » February 20th, 2009, 4:35 am

You may be able to save the files on the drive, there are recovery programs out there. You may also be able to recover files by downloading and burning a copy of linux ubuntu, set the bios to boot from a cd drive and start the computer off the ubuntu cd, you may be able to read the files that way and move them to another drive. Maybe some of the others here have some better ideas.
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Re: My hard drive! NUUU!

Post by Elvin » February 20th, 2009, 8:12 am

I was told the drive was no longer functional, so unless the guy was a quack computer doctor I don't think any recovery programs will work as you can't even read from it. The drive itself made a weird tapping sound when I tried to boot it up, in case anyone's ever heard of that symptom before.

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Re: My hard drive! NUUU!

Post by Dechant » February 20th, 2009, 8:25 am

A virus on your drive doesn't necessarily mean that's the end for your data; I'm pretty sure you can recover what's important to you if you know how. BUT when the drive itself gives up living, when the header crashes and destroys the surface of the drive's platter, then all is gone along with the drive. And that's what happened to me, too late I realised how fragile and ancient the mechanics of modern drives still is, that what's in our drives is "made in asia as cheap as possible, less durable than products made 50 years ago".

If you need a trustworthy backup method, then standard hard disk drives aren't a viable choice, even less external HDDs. However, they are the cheap option.


Nice friend you have there, downloading viruses to your system. :gg:

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Re: My hard drive! NUUU!

Post by oldwrench » February 20th, 2009, 2:50 pm

That rattling may have been the death rattle of a hard drive dying, Ive heard it before, or it could have been a messed up file system causing the drive to search endlessly for the files. You still might try one of the recovery programs. another trick to try, put the drive in a freezer for an hour, then hook it up as a second drive, don't spend time installing it, just hang it on the cables, and try booting the computer. I've done this with a failed drive and was able to recover files before it quit again.
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Re: My hard drive! NUUU!

Post by Elvin » February 20th, 2009, 3:37 pm

:pif: I'll try that if I'm in dire need of one of the files, I've already spent a day and a half replacing everything that was lost and it hasn't gone too badly.

He wasn't aware of the virus so I can't blame him :sob: I clicked on the file while he wasn't in the room, norton blocked a high risk virus. He walked in and clicked on the file again, norton failed to block it again :hmm: Of course it may be that my harddrive happened to die right when I suspected I got a virus, coincidentally

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Re: My hard drive! NUUU!

Post by Dechant » February 20th, 2009, 6:00 pm

You might have heard the click of death, but you should indeed try this freezing method first. If your drive has been found, act quick and copy your important data to another drive.

If that doesn't work, then there are several possibilities why your drive acts dead, one is a broken electronics on the HDD's board, another is that head (not header) crash.


I think I've used TestDisk when I had repairing the drive in mind.

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Re: My hard drive! NUUU!

Post by Sakura » February 20th, 2009, 6:22 pm

Total of 3 TB external memory. Daily backups. Full system recovery backups every 14 days. All first backups of a month go into my encrypted off-site storage.
I had two fatal crashes with massive data loss already. We live, learn, and backup.
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