pack a bowl
Member
stopped working for no reason this morning. Years of pictures, gone. fuck you WD
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WD hard drive is a POS
- Thread starter pack a bowl
- Start date
Budweiser13
Active member
Harddrives fail man you should have backed up your shit...
Sorry to hear about your drive going bad.
All is not lost though.. If you're willing to drop the cash, there are specialized data recovery businesses which will almost certainly be able to recover most, if not all of the data on that broken hard drive.
Hopefully you didn't go office space on it just yet hehe.
I can't tell you which one is best. I see one with a flat rate of 200 dollars, just to throw a figure out there for comparison. Google "hard drive data recovery" and you'll see most of the companies out there in the ads or in the results, and some potential home fixes you might be able to try.
As the other poster mentioned, hard drives do fail. I don't know what WD's current reputation is, but they've always treated me well.
All is not lost though.. If you're willing to drop the cash, there are specialized data recovery businesses which will almost certainly be able to recover most, if not all of the data on that broken hard drive.
Hopefully you didn't go office space on it just yet hehe.
I can't tell you which one is best. I see one with a flat rate of 200 dollars, just to throw a figure out there for comparison. Google "hard drive data recovery" and you'll see most of the companies out there in the ads or in the results, and some potential home fixes you might be able to try.
As the other poster mentioned, hard drives do fail. I don't know what WD's current reputation is, but they've always treated me well.
strydr
Member
Depending on what's wrong, your drive may be salvageable. Does it spin? Make noise (click, click, chchunk, chchunk, whrrrrr, etc..), or completely without power?
If you had a head crash (noises sounding like when it's time to change your brakes), you can try the freezer method. place your WD in the freezer for about 30 min. You do not want condensation, so wrap in a towel. The idea is, cold shrinks metal, so this will reduce the platter size, and un-stick the crash. Data may still be lost, but the disk should spin. If that works, you will have a limited time to recover the data, as soon as the drive heats up, it's bound to crash again. Use a external enclosure to house your drive, while you copy data to a different system. If the data is unreadable (windows asks to format), there are tools that can read the raw data, any put it back together without the evil Windows Format..
If the drive does not even spin up, first verify it's not a power supply (maybe that particular supply line has failed). If you cannot get it to power up, then either the motor has failed, or the circuitry that controls it has failed. The drive will need to be disassembled, rebuilt, and then you can recover data. As Mr. Bongjangles mentioned, data recovery is very expensive.
Last time I checked (granted, many years ago), recovery was something like 1K a gig, depending on how intensive the recovery process is.
Does you no good now, but backups are a lifesaver (obviously). When you buy a new HDD, buy two. Buy a external enclosure, and get some sync. software. Even better, buy two external drives, and rotate them every month (or week, depending on how important, and how much data changes per week). There are also plenty of options to save your stuff online (obviously, stuff you are not trying to hide).
Anyway, sorry to hear about your drive failure. It always sux to loose data.
If you had a head crash (noises sounding like when it's time to change your brakes), you can try the freezer method. place your WD in the freezer for about 30 min. You do not want condensation, so wrap in a towel. The idea is, cold shrinks metal, so this will reduce the platter size, and un-stick the crash. Data may still be lost, but the disk should spin. If that works, you will have a limited time to recover the data, as soon as the drive heats up, it's bound to crash again. Use a external enclosure to house your drive, while you copy data to a different system. If the data is unreadable (windows asks to format), there are tools that can read the raw data, any put it back together without the evil Windows Format..
If the drive does not even spin up, first verify it's not a power supply (maybe that particular supply line has failed). If you cannot get it to power up, then either the motor has failed, or the circuitry that controls it has failed. The drive will need to be disassembled, rebuilt, and then you can recover data. As Mr. Bongjangles mentioned, data recovery is very expensive.
Last time I checked (granted, many years ago), recovery was something like 1K a gig, depending on how intensive the recovery process is.
Does you no good now, but backups are a lifesaver (obviously). When you buy a new HDD, buy two. Buy a external enclosure, and get some sync. software. Even better, buy two external drives, and rotate them every month (or week, depending on how important, and how much data changes per week). There are also plenty of options to save your stuff online (obviously, stuff you are not trying to hide).
Anyway, sorry to hear about your drive failure. It always sux to loose data.
Wow....That really does suck man.
Honestly, out of all of the HD's i've used (It's been hundreds) Western Digital have been work horses.....
+10000000 on the back up advice.....OP, I know it's not much consolation at this point, but I would invest in an external back-up drive.
They're cheap now
I've had great success with this one
Link
More space than most will need, but a great investment at a time like this.
Honestly, out of all of the HD's i've used (It's been hundreds) Western Digital have been work horses.....
+10000000 on the back up advice.....OP, I know it's not much consolation at this point, but I would invest in an external back-up drive.
They're cheap now
I've had great success with this one
Link
More space than most will need, but a great investment at a time like this.
U
ureapwhatusow
all hard drives have a MTBF
mean time between failure
mean time between failure
That sucks...
Like most folks here...backup is important..I'll open the computer and make a slave drive and copy everything back to the hard-drive...Of course I have a backup drive already.
WD been a workhorse here too.For $35 You can get a new slave backup HD..The external ones are better for switching and adding to the slave drives.
Out of almost 8.5 years of having a computer,,,probably had 4 drives gone bad.
Seems to happen when playing music ALL the time.
Hell...some lady threw away a perfectly nice computer with monitor coming home one time (2.0GHZ pentium4-19 inch) on my bike that I stopped and talked with her and said If I can have the computer... She said "Yes" and "Carry the monitor downstairs"
The reason ??? Her hard-drive failed... Cost is $35 for a new HD ...
Old ladies have NICE computers!!!
Like most folks here...backup is important..I'll open the computer and make a slave drive and copy everything back to the hard-drive...Of course I have a backup drive already.
WD been a workhorse here too.For $35 You can get a new slave backup HD..The external ones are better for switching and adding to the slave drives.
Out of almost 8.5 years of having a computer,,,probably had 4 drives gone bad.
Seems to happen when playing music ALL the time.
Hell...some lady threw away a perfectly nice computer with monitor coming home one time (2.0GHZ pentium4-19 inch) on my bike that I stopped and talked with her and said If I can have the computer... She said "Yes" and "Carry the monitor downstairs"
The reason ??? Her hard-drive failed... Cost is $35 for a new HD ...
Old ladies have NICE computers!!!
I have a WD Caviar since 2001. Only 20 Gig and cost $100.00 but it still runs silent.
It must be luck of the draw then......I've had 3 SG's fail in rigs I've built in the past year alone.
I've had 1 WD fail in 10 years.
That Caviar SE that was mentioned above is a true beast.
might be bad karma ...hehe
pack a bowl
Member
hahaha nokuy, maybe if i believed in that type of stuff.
it makes a click noise (not really too loud, kinda gotta put your ear up to it).
i have 2 hard drives, and this one was my older one. I think this one was a 100 gig and since i heard 500 gigs are more prone to breaking, i put my photos on the 100 and music/videos on the 500... of course the one with all the shit that i can't replace broke.
thankfully i saved a bunch of my favorite photos and uploaded them onto flickr, but still so many lost memories.....
also, if i send it in, the hard drive is full of glass pipe pictures, old plants, hash, plenty of strains i've smoked since 06... and at least a few pictures of people smoking... so would i even be safe to have some one repair it?
it makes a click noise (not really too loud, kinda gotta put your ear up to it).
i have 2 hard drives, and this one was my older one. I think this one was a 100 gig and since i heard 500 gigs are more prone to breaking, i put my photos on the 100 and music/videos on the 500... of course the one with all the shit that i can't replace broke.
thankfully i saved a bunch of my favorite photos and uploaded them onto flickr, but still so many lost memories.....
also, if i send it in, the hard drive is full of glass pipe pictures, old plants, hash, plenty of strains i've smoked since 06... and at least a few pictures of people smoking... so would i even be safe to have some one repair it?
My hardware and software installation and maintenance course touched on professional ethics. The instructor explained that I would uncover all types of personal information, some of it illegal. He recommended NOT revealing documents of customer hard drives. I specifically asked "what about pictures of child porn?" The instructor said to use my own discretion.
There are tens of thousands of folks like me using their discretion about mj and paraphernalia pics. I wouldn't trust a single one with em.
Is the op system on the crashed drive? You may be able to access files on it if the op sys and necessary pic software is on a different drive.
There are tens of thousands of folks like me using their discretion about mj and paraphernalia pics. I wouldn't trust a single one with em.
Is the op system on the crashed drive? You may be able to access files on it if the op sys and necessary pic software is on a different drive.
The End Is Near
Member
The clicking makes me think you can't fix it on your own(hardware failure), as I've had to recover data a few times from corrupted hard drives. But if you can at least format it/ get it to show up again in a recovery program, then you may be able to recover data yourself. Getdataback is the program I use, and here it is if you want to give it a shot:
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=f3a24f9eb03e868f75a4fc82078ae6c8b746043b593a15f85621d66e282a0ee8
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=f3a24f9eb03e868f75a4fc82078ae6c8b746043b593a15f85621d66e282a0ee8
I have three words of advice: Backup. Backup. Backup.
For future reference, Seagate are the only drives currently on the market that offer a 3-year warranty (the Barracuda internal drives). I've never had one fail. Worst hard drives in my experience are Maxtor.
For future reference, Seagate are the only drives currently on the market that offer a 3-year warranty (the Barracuda internal drives). I've never had one fail. Worst hard drives in my experience are Maxtor.
I remember my Western Digital Raptor coming with a 5 year warranty.
I have a few seagates also and like them too. In regards to certain brands being better than other drives, a lot depends on the particular series. There have been high failure rates with particular series of certain brands in the past, but that doesn't mean that other series or models from the same brand are failure prone. I agree with you on maxtor, I've had bad experiences in the past, though I have no idea how their newer models are.
But yeah, in the end, it's all about back up. If anybody has something important to them on any drive, then just back that shit up, no matter which drive or brand you use. There's really no excuse for not keeping an extra copy of something that is important to somebody. Harddrives won't last forever, no matter which one you use.
doyoulikegreen
New member
Yes, backup backup backup. I've got all my important stuff mirrored between multiple hard drives and in multiple machines.
and yeah, WD has been nothing but a workhorse for me. Never had a problem with them.
and yeah, WD has been nothing but a workhorse for me. Never had a problem with them.
C
Cerb
I had a WD go bad a while back. No clicking. No spinning up. Not recognized in BIOS. Nothing. It's a control board failure. It holds 4 years of photography, Photoshop work, music, documents, and most importantly, Halo save games. I've sourced a few replacement logic boards, but most are just as expensive as data recovery services as it is a discontinued HDD with an odd firmware. I'm contemplating actually sending it to one of these places. Does anyone have any recommendations for data recovery services, or even better, a place that specializes in logic boards and may have the part I need?
