1 TB dead! Waaaah!

[miriam_e]

One of my 1 terabyte drives has suddenly, inexplicably died. Waaah! I bought it less than a year ago and it was almost full. Some of it was backed up, but much wasn't -- how do you backup a 1TB drive? The only way is with a second 1TB drive, and I didn't think I could afford to splash out on another drive merely as backup for my most recent drive. The disk itself is under warranty, but the data is the most valuable part.

Crap. Crap. Crap!

I'd been getting creepy, uneasy feelings about my oldest drive -- a now-ancient 120GB drive almost 7 years old, and was trying to gather the funds to buy a backup drive to safeguard the data on it. Who would have thought that my youngest drive would be the first to die. :(

Dammit!

Comments

[greylock.livejournal.com]

One thing I meant to mention, but I had to stop to butcher some co-orkers: last time my laptop drive died I had a few instances of rebooting where I was able to log in and copy off some data.

Sadly I squandered them and lost years worth of work and e-mails, but I'm wondering if yours is really hosed, or if there might be some spark of life?

I seem to recall reading of some Linux disc recovery tools. Have you looked into them? I have no idea how they work, but I'm wondering of your drive is getting power if it might be possible to get an image, even if it is incomplete.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

My machine doesn't even see the drive, even at the lowest level in the BIOS. [sigh]

Next time I go in to town I'll take the drive in to the shop where I bought it and see if it shows up on any of their machines. I don't think it will though. I'm not admitting total defeat yet however. Last option will be to try taking the little circuit board off the drive and swapping over another from an identical drive I have that still works. That is a scary, final, desperate act though.

I've used Linux to retrieve data from friends' MSWindows machines for them. Linux is marvelous for that, particularly Puppy Linux, because you can boot a Windows system into Puppy from an ordinary CD, or a thumbdrive and have a full, easy-to-use windowing operating system available to look through drives, and burn CDs or DVDs, or copy stuff to flash drives, or external hard drives.