Hard drive failure sucks

jdeg

^ broke something
Staff member
I've spent the better part of the day diagnosing and trying to recover my main computer. I woke up to a windows recovery program prompting me and then slowly started to realize that clicking sound wasn't going to go away.

The part that sucks is the drive that failed is an SAS drive in a RAID 0 array with another drive. I know, shouldn't have done that to begin with. It makes things a little more complex for trying to recover data. One drive it probably fine, but I can't use it until I attempt to recover that data.

Luckily I have most of the files on the drive backed up, but I fear there are some that didn't make it. I have an external drive with backups as well.

I ordered one of these: Amazon.com: Samsung Electronics 840 Pro Series 2.5-Inch 256 GB SATA 6GB/s Solid State Drive MZ-7PD256BW: Computers & Accessories and it'll be here tomorrow. !#@$!#@$ I just realized the price dropped $15 in the last 5 hours. GRRR!
 

Bill16

Senior Member
I'm sorry to hear how things have been going for ya buddy. I hope you'll be able to get everything back up to snuff and recover your data! :)
 

FastGlass

Senior Member
Sorry to hear. But allot of people are in the same situation hoping it will never happen till one day they loose most of their files. Then they finally do something. Hope you can recover what you assume you lost.
 

Blacktop

Senior Member
Sorry to hear this JDEG. I don't know if this will help, but Google Linux live disk. It is basically a Linux OS on a CD that you can boot your Windows machine with and recover data that you can't get to.
If you have another computer you can download the ISO image, burn it to a disk and try to boot your broken machine with it.
 

jdeg

^ broke something
Staff member
Thanks guys.

Yeah, I've been diddling with SystemRescueCD throughout the day. Testdisk is just throwing back bad sectors. I haven't done an image because I don't have the space (yet).
 
Backups are important. I just bought a new laptop and finished setting it up and making sure all my programs and files were on it and working and registered correctly. I then went about the task of reloading windows on the old laptop so it is fresh for its new task in life. All was well till I realized that there was one folder on the desktop that did not get moved. That's ok I should have it on my Desktop....Nope. It will be on Carbonite....No, I don't backup from that laptop....Suddenly remember that I had an automatic backup to a NAS drive. And people laughed at me for having double and triple backups.
 

WayneF

Senior Member
The part that sucks is the drive that failed is an SAS drive in a RAID 0 array with another drive. I know, shouldn't have done that to begin with. It makes things a little more complex for trying to recover data. One drive it probably fine, but I can't use it until I attempt to recover that data.

Luckily I have most of the files on the drive backed up, but I fear there are some that didn't make it. I have an external drive with backups as well.

RAID is not a factor, if a disk fails, it fails. It would have failed, RAID or not. Either way, that's when you need a disk image backup (backed up recently, every week or so). At failure, just bolt in a replacement disk, and restore the last backup, and 15 minutes later, you're up and running again, just like it was at last backup. There is no concern about trying to rescue failed data, because that is unimportant, you simply restore your current backup, 15 minutes. Often 10 minutes.

Not sure of your words, but just copying some files elsewhere is a crummy backup plan, not really a backup. The copied files is not a full system, and is not a bootable replacement, and is mostly useless. Sure, you may be able to recover your data files, that's good, but you still have to start from scratch, and reinstall the OS, and reinstall all programs again. Instead, a disk image backup is needed, makes everything very simple, a very simple job, only a few minutes. Normally, the first disk failure will teach this. :)

Even if the disk did not fail, maybe if the dumb computer just developed a strange problem and is not running right now, who cares? Just restore your backup, and 15 minutes later, it just like it always was. Restore is really a rather trivial operation.
 

aroy

Senior Member
As suggested, boot from the Linux disk and see if you can recover your data. In case there is a hardware failure, then there is not much you can do, except send it specialist data recovery service.

DO NOT let the OS recover bad sectors, that may ruin what ever data you have.
 

Deleted

Senior Member
You don't need to hear this, but it may help others reading this in future.

RAID 0 is interesting, it's not really RAID as it has no redundancy. All RAID 0 is doing is doubling your chance of disk failure. If the data is very important, you can use a specialist data recovery company, the good ones are very expensive.

I usually set up servers with RAID 5 & hotswaps. For desktops use SSD on the OS for speed & something like a Caviar Black for data. Never RAID for desktops, I've seen too many failures. Desktop RAID controllers are usually poor.

Always backup the data & don't leave the backup drives connected to the computer. Electrical "events" will usually take out the USB sockets & sometimes the connected backup drive.
 
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aroy

Senior Member
You don't need to hear this, but it may help others reading this in future.

RAID 0 is interesting, it's not really RAID as it has no redundancy. All RAID 0 is doing is doubling your chance of disk failure. If the data is very important, you can use a specialist data recovery company, the good ones are very expensive.

I usually set up servers with RAID 5 & hotswaps. For desktops use SSD on the OS for speed & something like a Caviar Black for data. Never RAID for desktops, I've seen too many failures. Desktop RAID controllers are usually poor.

Always backup the data & don't leave the backup drives connected to the computer. Electrical "events" will usually take out the USB sockets & sometimes the connected backup drive.

I agree, except that you can have a reliable RAID in a desktop. For a reliable RAID, you need at least 5 disks, preferably 7 with a hardware RAID controller, so that you can rebuild the data after 1 bit failure. For greater redundancy use other modes which can rebuild 2 bits or more, each bit will add another drive for error correction. I have put Adaptec, or used IBM RAID, in Servers and they are pretty reliable. A lower cost approach is to use a HDD backup utility which will just backup the files modified (or new). This has to be a part of your daily routine, as in my experience the data is lost the only time you forgot to back it up.

For my Images I do the following
. Copy the Images from card, keep the images on the card.
. Process the images, generate jpeg for the relevant images.
. Backup both the RAW and jpeg to two external disks - RAW and jpeg in one, and zipped RAW in another. As Nikon NX-D uses sidecar files for editing history, even if I loose jpeg, I can get then back from RAW.
. Once The data is backed up, I erase the images on the card. My card can hold 1600 RAW images from D3300, but my battery requires a charge between 350 and 600 shots. So I format the card every time I charge the battery.
. If I am outstation, then the images are kept in two cards and I process them when I return.
 

Eyelight

Senior Member
I had a drive fail in one of our laptops last year. The work related files were on a regular backup plan, but some personal files were not. The drive would not spin, but loss was not worth the cost to send it in for recovery. Nothing to lose, so we pulled the drive apart, turned the disk by hand (yeah, I know, don't do this at home). Then used a recovery software to image the disk. The software then used the image to recover files, which it did remarkably well. Probably recovered 80-90% of the files from a frozen drive.
 

aroy

Senior Member
I ordered one of these: Amazon.com: Samsung Electronics 840 Pro Series 2.5-Inch 256 GB SATA 6GB/s Solid State Drive MZ-7PD256BW: Computers & Accessories and it'll be here tomorrow. !#@$!#@$ I just realized the price dropped $15 in the last 5 hours. GRRR!

When I had ordered a Hoya filter, I found that the price had dropped. I promptly cancelled the order and ordered the reduced price one. The best part was that the lower price filter was also in the same e-portal - Flipkart in India. In the reason for cancellation I gave "Price reduced". That is all.
 

jdeg

^ broke something
Staff member
I managed to image the drive last night with the help of systemrescuecd. Bad sectors were written out. (Yey!). The only prob is the old drive is bigger than the new ssd one, so I'm going to have to load everything to a 3rd drive (which i same day ordered), move some files, load image to new drive. Blah.

I'm pretty sure I'm just going to image drives from now on now that I know how easy it is.

Also I cancelled my original order with Amazon and reordered, but it'll still get here today. I'll just return the reorder. Amazon prime was a lifesaver in this situation, especially since I have same day delivery available! Holy crap that's fast.
 

jdeg

^ broke something
Staff member
And yeah I'd love to have the ssd raid 5 array that this sites server uses but I think it's a bit overkill for a workstation. :)
 

aroy

Senior Member
The best option for a workstation is RAID 1 - Disk mirror. Every OS supports it and chances of failure are quite low.
 

jdeg

^ broke something
Staff member
I had a drive fail in one of our laptops last year. The work related files were on a regular backup plan, but some personal files were not. The drive would not spin, but loss was not worth the cost to send it in for recovery. Nothing to lose, so we pulled the drive apart, turned the disk by hand (yeah, I know, don't do this at home). Then used a recovery software to image the disk. The software then used the image to recover files, which it did remarkably well. Probably recovered 80-90% of the files from a frozen drive.

I'm amazed that worked! What software did you use? Luckily my drive that failed was still spinning, it just has bad sectors (9 to be exact).

Oh, and if anyone is curious, the program I ended up using is called ddrescue. You kind of have to know what you're doing with linux command prompts. The command I ran looked like this: ddrescue -d -f -r3 /dev/dm-0 "/media/Storage 2/main_drive/main_drive.img" "/media/Storage 2/main_drive/rescue.log" which means, image drive dm-0 to /media/Storage 2, which is just my large storage drive. You can also image directly to a new drive, but I did it to a file on an existing drive since I don't have the new drive yet and I wasn't sure it was going to work.

There are other programs out there, but most of them run on top of windows only. Since my primary partition went I would've had to reload windows fresh on a new drive, get windows & the program to recognize the damaged RAID partition, and hope that it works.

FYI, you can use ddrescue to image and restore anything - even an sd card gone bad. It'll 0 out the bad sectors so everything will be in order when loaded onto a new card.
 

WayneF

Senior Member
RAID 0 is interesting, it's not really RAID as it has no redundancy. All RAID 0 is doing is doubling your chance of disk failure.

Raid 0 is two disks spinning instead of one. So people assume two disks have twice the possibility of failure as one disk. This is true of Raid 1 also.
But in Raid 0, each is writing half the data in only hall the time, so maybe it instead has twice the life. :) And any time any disk fails, it is a problem.

I make a little batch file that copies only my important and changing data files (to updated zip files) on another drive (email, quicken, etc).

"C:\program files\7-zip\7za" u -tzip E:\backup\html.zip C:\HTML\*
"C:\program files\7-zip\7za" u -tzip E:\backup\MyDocuments.zip C:\Users\w\Documents\*
"C:\program files\7-zip\7za" u -tzip E:\backup\QuickenQdata.zip C:\ProgramData\Quicken\qdata.*
"C:\program files\7-zip\7za" u -tzip E:\backup\Eudora.zip "D:\ProgramData\Eudora\Mail\*.*"
"C:\program files\7-zip\7za" u -tzip E:\backup\misc.zip C:\Misc\*.*
xcopy "C:\Users\w\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\63oaf400.default\reminderfox\*.ics" E:\backup\reminderfox\ /D /y
pause
exit

This is just a simple desktop click, and I do it frequently, probably every day, and certainly on days when that data changes in any important way. It only copies changed files, according to file dates.

Then a disk image backup every week or two gets all else. Then at any failure (disk or system), just replace and restore, it can reboot in 15 minutes, and the zip files have everything important that changed since that last backup.
 
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Eyelight

Senior Member
I'm amazed that worked! What software did you use?

Data Rescue 3 by Prosoft Engineering. It will also recover files from SD cards, USB drives, etc. I was able to use it to recover some of the work files that had been made on SD cards the week before the drive failed. As I remember, the software boots from the CD, loads a simple menu to work from, so needs no other OS.

To clarify, we opened the drive and turned the disk to free it up and then put it back together. It ran for a bit, but would not boot. That's when I acquired the rescue software and made the image.

The dumb@#$ part of my story is the laptop overheated when it failed to sleep with the screen closed. I could have/should have made a last minute backup and had a full backup, but like a dumb@#$, just didn't do it and a few days later it gave it up.
 
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