[RHIC]

Gentlemen, ladies... a moment of silence.

My data drive started to get dementia a few days ago. Picked up a replacement drive today, but after a reboot, I think it gave in.

A repository stretching back into a.cotto and newsgroups was on there. And now it is on the other side... 

Porn Cache
1999 - 2013

[tdotter]

Oh,no!
Didn't you have any of your library saved somewhere else?

[RHIC]

I bought a WD external with the surprisingly easy to use Smartware backup software, but... elected to only automatically backup some things, not everything. I couldn't bring myself to backup naked lady stuff.

I sort of developed a joke around it when the internet gained critical mass... "You see some good porn, and you save it... and you never go look at it again, because there's no time! The new porn is out!"

[pedonbio]

Hell, I have a mountain of porn stored on floppies, and no port to play 'em on.

[Eliza D]

^This reminds me of several computers that we have stored in the unfinished portion of our basement.  Cris claims that he's keeping them so that he can test out webpages that he creates on older browsers that are on those machines.  I have yet to see him do so.  But I do know one thing.  Cris has got a bunch of files on the oldest machine that he never copied to anywhere else.  In order to access them (I'm guessing there are some old stories on there, but my suspicion is that its mostly old porn ) he has to copy them to a floppy (as its too old for USB ports), then put that floppy into another newer machine that has both a floppy drive and a USB port and copy it over to a stick, and then finally put the stick into his current desktop.  I asked him why he just doesn't hook up the old dinosaur to the internet and simply email himself the pix, but he gave me some kind of unintelligible reply about computer stuff that I don't even remember. 

[RHIC]

Also, on another forum I joked about it, but the detail left out was that it was my specialized fetish porn. I can't just get that anywhere people!  

Mod edit: my condolences on your loss RHIC. You're hardly the first person to experience this. I don't know... I guess it's human nature... assuming it'll always happen to someone else: that must be why people don't make back-ups. It's almost effortless: you just get a huge cheap external hard drive, plug it in and click-and-drag your archive over to it in a few chunks. Then you put it back in the box with a note (what's on it, when the back-up was written) and go stash it in a safe place.

Fry's has a 3TB one for $109. and that's not even such a great price (I've paid less, and quite a while ago too). A drive that size could back up EVERYTHING 90% of users have: porn. papers, photos, music, etc... A helluva small price to pay for peace of mind.

PS: is the drive that failed internal or external? Don't give up on the data until you've gone through all the usual salvage steps.

[TheZookie007]

You can probably get all of the data back, if you do nothing more to it. Take it immediately to a data recovery service. Don't futz around with it.

[SwitcherX]

I feel your pain. 

Check out this thread.

[RHIC]

It was a 2TB Hitachi. It started getting strange read errors two weeks ago; a looooong CHKDSK was able to fix it and write 68Kb of bad sectors; I knew in the back of my mind that it meant that the drive most likely would not stop there and take the entire piss, so the next day I went to Fry's to get a replacement 1TB (most of the disk was empty anyway). Fry's was out of stock of the good 1TB drives! Can you believe that? (internal). So I got lazy and there were no more errors for a week, then the read errors came back with a vengeance and CHKDSK would not complete past 1% anymore; after installing another drive and a couple boots, the drive stops being recognized by the PC (and by an external SATA dock) altogether.

I think the platters and spindles are fine; they spin, when the drive is powered you can feel 3 soft 'bumps' of the read head trying to go somewhere and never does. I've been researching HDD surgery videos out of curiosity and it's not for the faint of heart!

[Tugboatcap]

... In order to access them (I'm guessing there are some old stories on there, but my suspicion is that its mostly old porn ) he has to copy them to a floppy (as its too old for USB ports), then put that floppy into another newer machine that has both a floppy drive and a USB port and copy it over to a stick, and then finally put the stick into his current desktop....

Much easier way is to get an IDE/SATA to USB drive adapter.  Pull the drive, plug it into the converter and use the included power supply and plug the other end into a USB port on your current computer and walla!  Instant drive access!  And, they only cost about $15 - $20 tops.

We use them all the time here at work to transfer data from older machines to newer ones.

I've used them on drives I have that date to as far back as around 1990.  (Ah, my Epson 80086)

TugboatCap!

[Palomine]

Much easier way is to get an IDE/SATA to USB drive adapter.  Pull the drive, plug it into the converter and use the included power supply and plug the other end into a USB port on your current computer and walla!  Instant drive access!  And, they only cost about $15 - $20 tops.

We use them all the time here at work to transfer data from older machines to newer ones.

I've used them on drives I have that date to as far back as around 1990.  (Ah, my Epson 80086)

TugboatCap!

That's fine, but no different than installing the drive in an external enclosure (which is what you describe, plus a case). Neither of those approches is likely to help if the drive itself is the problem.

If the drive has an integral electromechanical or electronic problem, taking it out of the PC and hooking it back up via another interface isn't going to help.

JMHO.