Must be so unlucky at the moment I have 3 drives im my machine and one of them started clunking so i backed this up while I could and it started crashing out my PC I couldnt get to scrub the data so threw it out.

 

I thought least its not my main drive then my PC hangs and on restart the main drive is clunking and dead.

 

I have just ordered a new one from Amazon and have a disc image backed up from June this year but there is some stuff that I would of liked to recover.

 

Is there a way to recover what I need from this dead drive its a 500 GB drive but I have songs on it from my late father singing that I would like to get back, I uploaded some to the cloud but not all of them.

 

Bloody hard drives, I wish the solid state drives would come down as these have no moving parts and would (I expect) to be more reliable.

 

Both drives were under 6 years old and the main drive didn't even give me any warning :(

Out of curiosity, how old is your rig? It could be down to your power supply.

Most drives don't give you any warning unless you have a raid system setup....If the drive it truly dead then the only way is to fork out some cash and get the thing recovered from a specialist centre. Again and sorry to say but not all the time they can recover the data....

 

I would recommend these guys http://www.krollontrack.co.uk/data-recovery/ but I have not personally used there for more than 5 years...

 

SSD are a little bit hit and miss really. Yes they are without moving parts but are a real pain when they die....near impossible to recover from what I have been told. SSD's have a lower write cycle than normal disks but are in my view very good to be an OS disk or a Backup of a Backup....basically a backup that can be stored somewhere with only vital or needed files on it.... If you do get your data back or just carry on with what you have I would certainly recommend a purchase of a caddy and 256gb solid state disk. Backup the most vital files you have and then store in a safe place.... 

 

LGM is correct in saying that maybe it's worth checking the rig out as sometimes you may not have enough power going to both which thus can cause them to short and then ruin the drives themselves....but in all fairness I actually have not seen something like that happen for a number of years. 

The only PC I have seen with multiple drive failures was down the location; it was on a suspended wooden floor and got bounced around by people walking past it all the time.

Edited 22 September, 201312 yr by GentleGiant

Out of curiosity, how old is your rig? It could be down to your power supply.

 

My thought too, or a mobo problem.

Many moons ago I once had ten hard drives die in 3 days. It was a faulty batch of Fujitsu Siemens I think it was a disgruntled employee who put some sort of virus in the firmware because they were all about a few days out of warranty when they went. It was a well known problem at the time and affected thousands of people we were lucky by all accounts.

Do you remember the IBM deathstar. They were notorious for dying but not before making the notorious noise for months....

I managed to recover all my data from a failed HD. PC wouldn't boot, couldn't access it at all when set up as a slave drive in another PC or in a disk caddie. Tried all the free recovery programmes and nothing would work.

 

Bought "Recover my Files" and I could access and copy over all the data = happy chappy

plenty of free recovery programs on hirens boot cd or ultimate boot cd I think? May or may not work depending how dead your disk is..

 

worth a crack before you splurge out on something

might justbe worth checking the cabling to it first - had an intermittent problem with a HDD recently that eventually gave up completely and it turned out to be the sata cable.  £1.99 replacement and all is fine.

Do you remember the IBM deathstar. They were notorious for dying but not before making the notorious noise for months....

 

I was that soldier. It was about the same time as the Fujitsu failures. I was working in a school then and I must have changed 50 disks in a month or so. All Fujitsu or IBM.

 

Then all the mobos started going because of duff caps

I hated them.....2 running on a server for a year or 2 and one day saw several emails saying the raid controller could not read disk 1.....next thing i knew the other went down and so the recovering of data began..... Fujitsu laptop drives were awful, had 3 fail on me in 2 years.....

 

Another that i have never been so keen on....Western Digital. We had a batch inside dells in a company i contracted for and pretty much over 200 failed over a period of 4 months....luckily we had a system to get machines imaged quickly....but not the SCCM way....more like ghost and go....data was stored on our servers....

I seem to remember that most/all of those failures were down to a dodgy plastics formula supplied by a single 3rd party company to 80% of the worlds HDD makers. I think Samsung were the only major player not affected, as they do everything in-house.

Out of curiosity, how old is your rig? It could be down to your power supply.

 

Its just over 2 years old one of the drives was dated April 2007 and the 500gb drive was from my brother in laws sky+ box which to be honest I shouldn't of used it for a PC but you learn by your mistakes.

 

The 1TB drive came from amazon and I am now all up and running again, just had to re-install quite a bit of stuff.

Edited 27 September, 201312 yr by justinbarrow

I seem to remember that most/all of those failures were down to a dodgy plastics formula supplied by a single 3rd party company to 80% of the worlds HDD makers. I think Samsung were the only major player not affected, as they do everything in-house.

 

I remember it being the Chinese who stole a formula for electroyte in capacitiors. But they didn't steal all of it or made a duff copy. Everything they made from the stolen formula started to go US after a few years.

 

Actually maybe that was the mobo failures around the same time, my memory is going, a bit like those disks.

Edited 28 September, 201312 yr by Aspman

I remember it being the Chinese who stole a formula for electroyte in capacitiors. But they didn't steal all of it or made a duff copy. Everything they made from the stolen formula started to go US after a few years.

 

Actually maybe that was the mobo failures around the same time, my memory is going, a bit like those disks.

 

Chinese government backed industrial espionage is the thing that annoys me the most. We are absolutely powerless to do anything about it. When I think about all the great inventions by US, Europe and the US It narks me that a nation of copiers and plagiarisers run by communist dictators will become the dominant superpower and supress our species evolution. We aught to flood all our servers with terabytes of bogus formula's, equations specifications etc. and keep them busy trying to translate and verify if its genuine or not. Kind of counter espionage.

Chinese government backed industrial espionage is the thing that annoys me the most. We are absolutely powerless to do anything about it. When I think about all the great inventions by US, Europe and the US It narks me that a nation of copiers and plagiarisers run by communist dictators will become the dominant superpower and supress our species evolution. We aught to flood all our servers with terabytes of bogus formula's, equations specifications etc. and keep them busy trying to translate and verify if its genuine or not. Kind of counter espionage.

 

You mean like the duff info on Concorde's wing shape that caused the Russian version to crash and burn - killing everyone on board??

I managed to recover all my data from a failed HD. PC wouldn't boot, couldn't access it at all when set up as a slave drive in another PC or in a disk caddie. Tried all the free recovery programmes and nothing would work.

Bought "Recover my Files" and I could access and copy over all the data = happy chappy

I've used that program numerous times on dead drives. Seems to do what other programs can't