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I've done this before and it works, but ONLY if your failure is a heat problem and not caused by a circuit board that's gone awry. It will not work in that case.
Laurie
Sorry, maybe using online storage to backup your files free might work for you.
Not necessarily. I had an old external drive that Windows wouldn't recognize. However, Recuva did see it and it ran several recovery routines. Image data was spotty, but textual data was nearly perfect, just some formatting needing redoing on the word processing files. In other words, Windows did see it but didn't know what it was so it didn't display it as being a drive - something like that. I really think the data is likely recoverable. You just need to figure out a way. As I said earlier, please post on a site like Linus Tech Tips or Tom's Hardware asking for additional solutions.
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Another advantage of the online backup is that it is physically someplace else. If your home is vandalized, burns down, floods, etc, a local backup could also be destroyed along with the original drive.
...ugh it also installed Google Chrome (immediately uninstalled that). This s what I hate about these free software downloads as they often have something piggybacked with them I don't want or need.
...well Recauva didn't see it either. which means most likely is definitely a hardware issue.
With all sincerity, you should take the time to have a professional recovery service check it out. For the price of a troubleshooting fee, you may find out that sizable portions of the actual data can be recovered for a reasonable price. Just because the drive doesn't boot your computer, doesn't mean that all of the data is corrupted.
Not all types of data recovery costs hundreds or thousands of dollars.
For what little it's worth, I had an external drive failure several years back. It was audibly a hardware issue, and I'd pretty much reconciled myself to having lost everything on the disk. A few months later, after I'd bought a replacement, I decided to give the old drive one last try. Hooked it up, it mounted (noisily) and lasted long enough to get everything copied over.
I'm sorry that this happened, your situation sucks, no way around it. But:
I would also encourage you to try for data recovery. If you can't afford it now, hang onto the drive until something changes; worst case you've wasted a few inches of desk space. while the drive may be unrecoverable, you won't know until you try, and if you discard it now that WILL be unrecoverable.
If you were considering giving up entirely, that means you are no longer buying any future content, and those funds, however limited if > 0, could then be allocated to go towards data recovery. Granted that might not be enough, or might be better spent doing something different, and if spent and it fails that would also be gone, or if spent and successfull they would still be gone. However, would the gain be better than the loss if your gamble pays off? Will not trying and wondering if it would have worked eat at you more than trying and possibly failing and then moving on?
Your call on whether to continue or not. However it is possible that while still painful, if you decide to redo some of your work, the 2nd time around might be faster due to knowlege and experienced gained from having done it the first time around.
If you do decide to continue, make the purchase of backup hardware a funding requirement before doing anything else. If you can't afford it, wait until you can. Also note that Top Ramen costs about 20 cents a meal. (I'm so sick of that stuff, but feel I must point out the value of having some every so often.)
Consider used hardware. Yes, there's risk, but if you are on the oh-my-god-I-can't-afford-to-eat budget, maybe the risk is worth the potential reward. You won't be able to exactly duplicate this, but for example once when on a tight budget I got a free hard drive that had a part broken off and was being discarded. I queried complete strangers on the internet about parts, took a gamble and ordered the part from some electronics supplier (I forget how much but probably a buck for the part and $5 for shipping I bet) and hand-soldered in (horrible crooked solder job). Tested the snot out of it then ran it for maybe a year in a spare PC, finally ended up using it as my primary PC's hard drive for years when I ran out of space. It worked great. That could have gone wrong any number of ways, but didn't, and at the time (about when there was a drive shortage due to flooding in Thailand) saved me a great deal of money, and gave me a great story to boot. (..... "to boot"... ::drum roll::). Seriously though, if your only options are "bad" and "worse", go with "bad", and remember the future is not entirely predictable.
You may not have lost things at all. VHD is "Virtual Hard Disk", and if it's compressed (which it may well be), that's large enough to contain over half a terabyte of stuff. You need to find a way to mount it.
Apparently windows 7 can "mount" a vhd file (google "open .vhd file") also, they say winzip can extract the contents of a vhd file
I'm so sorry to hear this, KK. I'd hate to lose you from the community. If you do decide to do some kind of fundraising to either try for professional drive restore or kickstart your motivation again, I'd be happy to kick in. Drop me a PM if necessary.
My ex husband once deleted my entire book...over 700 pages. I know that pain of losing so much hard work.
My advice is get mad, get sad, wallow for a couple of days.
Then start again, use some of the great and caring advice given above. Yes, you CAN do it !
...only considering a new drive. Used hardware, particularly drives will only ensure the same will happen sooner and it really isn't much of a savings as new HDDs are pretty inexpensive already with the advent of SSDs I can get a new 7200 RPM 2 TB drive for about a third of what I paid for of the drive that went bad. I can even get a new 4 TB for less than what the old drive cost (which I am considering for backup purposes).
As a last ditch inexpensive recovery try, I put out the word for a new PCB board as a number of the symptoms point to the fact that may be the failing point. If I can get it to spin up long enough I should be able to copy the Daz library/runtime and scene/scene subset folders (provided they have not been corrupted) off to the new drive. If that doesn't work then it's having to go all the way back to square one.and like I mentioned, looking at around a year or more rebuilding what I already had for the story world.
I've been running this drive for 6 years, originally in a somewhat damp environment, then in a very dusty one (and the computer has been moved twice in that time as well), so while not very pleased with the situation, I'm actually surprised it lasted this long as the average life (with high usage in a favourable environment) is something like 4 years.
Oh and at my age, I need to be careful of what I eat. Cheap overprocessed foods like Top Ramen those artificially "flavoured" noodle bowls are among the worst items out there for someone like myself (along with mac and orange chemicals in a box as well as pink slime hot doggies).
Speaking of food, time to warm up a container from a big batch of my special burrito filling I made the other night.
So sorry this happened to you KK but please remember Everything happens for a reason, you just have to figure out what that reason is.
Also, I have a confession .... I have never made a backup of anything on my computers and I also have never had a HD fail and never lost anything, over the course of owning 5 desktops ( 2 of which I built) and 2 laptops. Perhaps it is time I learned how to create a backup??!!
Not that this helps, but I've found that I become too attached to a lot of stuff I've worked on, to the point that unless forced, I'd never go back and do the things it would take to improve it which often means starting form scratch. Sometimes losing my old stuff is like a heavy wgt being removed. Sort of like when your HD dies and you have to decide what you actually want to install on that beautiful new clean drive and what software you really never did anything with.
...so how does one do this? It currently is on the external drive. I thought when you backed up a drive it would require a lot more space. I didn't realise it compressed the data.
Keep an eye on Best Buy daily deals. They launch at midnight Central Time (or around there) and often have 3TB, 8TB WD Passport / Easy Store external drives on sale. ) I have all my products on one external, and copied on the 8TB too. I don't use cloud storage because I have a backup of the backup. :)
KK- if you are too discouraged to continue, all you can do is give it time and see if you feel the same way. If you lost your writing(s) then decide to tackle it again, you will probably recapture the feeling and scope, and may do even better. Just do what makes you feel better.
...the writings are safe as none of that was in the failed drive (or even on the same system). It's all the setting and character development work that's gone and without the "recipes" (eg. shaping/morphing parameters, surface, render settings, etc.) a lot of the rebuilding will pretty much be back to "trial and error" as my memory is not that good these days to recount everything I did and used.
...so OK one question HDDs are basically HDDs whether they say they are for general use, gaming enterprise or data centre correct? Is there any advantage to an enterprise or data centre drive?
I never do traditional backups with my home computer because face it most of us aren't needed to tune our OS kernal or make complex OS & app configurations to run business middleware and remote client apps. Also there is the everchanging apps that do the backup changing what they can or cannot read and write so a risk of loosing backwards compatibility.
So, I just 'cut & paste' /Documents to an external USB drive that is big enough to handle it & wait about a day or day and a half. That gives me the luxury also of accessing the files without need for a backup utility to search & read the backup archives & extract if I want a closer look. It's been a long time since NTFS has changed and Apple and other OSes understand NTFS too.
..a 512 GB USB is still pretty pricey compared to an HDD (and very slow as my system only has USB 2.0). Sometimes there are things you don't want to chop up, like your runtime/library/scene folder.
You might want to give this a go (There are inexpensive data recovery programs that you can get!) as you don't really need to take your drive to price gouging data recovery services!
..I'll give the trial scan a go to see if it detects the drive, but 60$ is a bit out of budget particularly if it doesn't work.
Still working on finding a replacement PCB card to see if that might do the trick so I can dump the runtimes and scene files to another drive.
Have you tried SpinRite from Steve Gibson: that has brought many drives back from the brink. Not free, unfortunately.
Sorry to hear your news.
Those usually have better/longer life spans, and are designed for 24/7 use. Budget wise, they are pricier, so probably just better getting two cheaper drives, and just mirroring them.
All comes down to not having a single point of failure - which even the best enterprise level drives have.
...I set up a custom runtime/library structure (because I hate haphazard the way Daz does it and Smart Content is often not that bright as the CMS is flawed [nor does it take into account freebies and content purchased at other stores]) which is painstakingly categorised by type so I don't waste a lot of production time searching for items I need for a scene (because some is installed under a vendor's name, while others are is installed under the item's name, or the type of item, and some just has screwball names that make no sense). I'm not about to go through rebuilding that from scratch every time a drive fails or or I am transferring it all to a bigger drive or different machine. Hence yes, a big HDD comes in very handy, and a 500 GB to 1 TB HDD is much more affordable than say a 512 - 1 TB USB stick or SSD. My current runtime structure alone is over 600GB. and there are others here with much larger ones.
any years ago I used to back up on DVDs before drive prices came down and that was a nightmare (DVDs also can degrade quicker than HDDs so they are not a very good medium, I lost a tonne of freebie content this way some of which is no longer available). Also some 3D stores require a pay fee to reactivate downloads after a certain length of time and if they vault something, it can disappear from your list (unlike here). This is why I also keep a backup of installers for non Daz purchases, as well as freebies.
...mirroring, as in a RAID setup? Or can that also be done with an external drive? Building a system is one thing for me, dealing with the nuances of software is another. In either case, I take it that means both drives must of the the same capacity.
Currently looking at a 2 or 3 GB drive as the replacement. May as well go for expanded capacity as I'll have to get a new drive even if I can recover the runtime/scene data form the broken one or the it is in the compressed backup on the old external I have)
Well, RAID mirroring is good.. but I think you were against that. Modern RAID controllers don't really impact the speeds that massively any more either for what its worth.
Regardless, there are loads of free apps where you can just say mirror the contents of this, to this drive (providing the latter is the same or bigger capacity to the former) it will just compare the two and mirror the contents. You should be able to even schedule it so you can just set it and forget it. Paid-for versions offer version control, etc, so you can mitigate the risk of copying corrupt data to the backup.. but that's getting down the rabbit hole a bit too much.
Whatever it is you get to replace it, please try and get two of them.. otherwise you're just gonna repeat the same process (get the biggest drive you can initially, then don't the means to back it up). That $35 drive I saw yesterday on Ebay, that was new btw.. though I'd still argue even a second hand drive would be better than nothing.