My Hard Drive Croaked. Anything to be done?
daveso
Posts: 7,150
in The Commons
My hard drive went out. My PC does not see it at all. I've rebooted, and it worked for a little bit, got a few files off., then it just went away. Tried to connect using a SATA cable and external power, but it is not seen at all.
ALL of my programs and data, including DAZ content, etc were on that drive. Considering the drive is not seen internally or externally, is there any way to recover that data?
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Comments
Is that the OS drive or additional drives?
buy a new one and start downloading your content
sorry about your lost scenes and custom characters etc
always a good idea to save those in a separate library on another drive, can do in future
Always a good idea to have back ups.
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Still have you checked the physical connections? And, if you can, tried a different cable?
As has been said always back up for such an occasion, as you never know when your HDD/SSD is going to go boom.. It is why I have about 8 or so external 1 and 2 TB HDD's a 4 TB NAS, another 1 TB external SSD.. Not to mention the 1 TB and 250 GB NVME SSD's a 500 GB and 4 TB HDD in my system.. And not to forget the myriad assortment of 4/8/16/64 and 128 GB thumb drives.. I learnt to go overboard, when years ago I lost over 500GB of data due to a drive mishap..
The only thing you could do is to see if another computer will see the drive.. If not depending on how badly you want the data take it to a computer shop, or take/send to a data recovery service.. Also a lot depends on the age of the drive, as with everything electronic nothing lasts forver unfortunately..
data drive
yeah..pretty new drive just over 2 years old. I know backup but I also know I'm a fool for not doing it routinely. Its upsetting. at myself. I have an external setup to hookup SATA drives...which I did, and my computer does not recognize it at all.
sort of. I have an external setup which I tried this morning, but the drive is not recognized at all. I'm kicking myself hard. Lost family photos, tons of downloads, tons ... all my programs, a whole lot of ebooks. on and on. And I know about backing up, been saying it for years, and just a week ago my wife and I were discussing backing up her photos. I have a couple external drives for backing up. just don;t do it much. I need to allow the system to back up routinely, but I'm sort of a control freak and like to do it myself. too late now for this data. Its a fresh start for sure. Maybe DS will run without so much installed.
I make it a point to at least double back up everything. The rarest of rare happened to me. My primary failed but had everything on my external backed up so I go to put it all on the new hard drive and that external failed in process and was now dead. Only my luck would that ever occur to anyone. Long story short. I back everything up on my external and the really important stuff is also backed up on a 512GB flash drive. I have another 512GB flash drive just for all my Daz zips and I buy more as needed. I'm working off my laptop atm so only have the C:, external and flash drive. I have 4 HDD of varying sizes in my desktop and 2 externals there for backups and storage.
Do you have access to another computer? If you are able to get access to another computer, it might just recognise the drive.. For as strange as it may sound, things like this can happen for a reason that no one truly knows why..
facts, I have a drive my Win10 can read but my Win7 I originally used it with cannot, and my TV can read it
it does however cause Bluescreens on the Win10 so don't plug it in there, it's on my TV now
We bought a docking bay for the purpose of retrieving files from dead hard drives if anything are available. If one goes we replace it and then put the drive that just crapped and put it in the docking bay and so far a good portion of the time we've been able to recover our files. Is a pretty cheap way of possibly getting your files back.
You might be able to see if one of those data recovery services cound help out, but they are quite expensive. I had a friend who had a borked drive and they were able to recover data, but it was about $1,500 (US) for him.
For backing up my Daz Studio assets, I use a free program called SyncFolders. It watches the drive on which I have my libraries, and whenever it finds new, changed, or deleted files, it syncs them with an external USB drive. I have it back up both the information that would be in the Users/Public directory and my user directory, so all the things like manifest files, etc. are backed up as well. I use Task Scheduler to set it to run every day at 5:00 a.m. as I generally leave my PC running.
In theory, if my Daz data drive ever fails, I can change its drive letter to match the one that failed and Daz Studio would work normally.
I back up to the Apple Cloud, onto external HDs and burn everything onto discs. Because once a bolt of lightning fried my computer and everything attached to it. I keep the external HDs unattached to the computer unless I need to access something.
Backup or Cry! Dang, that's catchy!
I dropped a work laptop once and it cost $2400 cdn to recover that drive... If the drive platters aren't actually damaged, then a professional service can probably recover it. They will do all kinds of things, like.. replace busted electronics. However, these services aren't cheap, and backing things up before failure is much wiser.
If the drive was running hot, cooling it down might work, in the past I got several returned drives cheap because they were running hot and used them for years afterwards in my home made 'wind tunnel'.
If the drive was making funny noises, that's a bad sign.
I've had some good luck (twice) with a company called R-Tools Technology and their R-Studio software- once to recover data from a dead drive and once to recover data from (and I still can't explain my stupidity) a drive that I accidentally erased. YMMV, of course.
Does the drive show up in BIOS, at least?
Please say you had a backup of at least your unique files. I don't back up stuff that I can re-download from the store, but I do backup all my scene files, custom presets, and custom textures.
If it's the circuit board that's gone bad it can usually be fixed by replacing it, if you can find one that matches.
Good luck. I've rarely had HD issues although not that long ago I had one of those (older) WD My Passport usb drives finally call it quits. And I had it pulled apart to see if I can get into it.
I watched some of the above Linus Tech tips video and recall the drive interface circuit board swap in another video though had no idea about the chip on the boards Linus referred to having to move over as well it was just a like for like board swap that apparently worked.
thanks for all replies and suggestions. Will try to answer some of the questions...
The drive is not recognized by the system or using external SATA and power. According to one recovery software company I called, I was told if it can;t be seen, the software will not be able to retrieve anything.
I contacted a recovery company here in town. They told me it would be around $800 give a take a few hundred. The question, is the data worth that much? Time to redlownload and install everything? I'll be pondering that for a bit.
I had backed up some of my stuff before, but its been at least 6 months, as I'm just not good with keeping up with stuff like this. I use my system most of the day and then turn it off, so to schedule later might not work. Guess I could leave it on later, simple enough.
I bought a rpelacement drive this afternoon but will try a few more things before I give up. I was an electronic tech for many yars so have no problem taking a drive apart and replacing whatever, if its accessible and doable. Clean room or not... it might be worth the parts if I can find them to at least give it a shot.
I had a drive die recently, it was a bit hit and miss and invisible to the system as well.
I was lucky/stupid enough to try something daft and it worked. I removed the power plug from the drive and booted the system up as normal, I then plugged the power back into the faulty drive and Windows discovered it and I was able to access it and copy everything from it.
No guarantee it will work for you, but probably worth a try before you bin it.
I think my cloud backup is called Backblaze. Has saved my hide a few times. Can be set up to auto backup. I still do a hard copy to external drives, but after two failed in a row, it was comforting to have the cloud.
Recover from backup.
To those that don't do backups:
Seriously! Why don't folks do backup?
The pain of losing our hard work makes the boring part of backing up easily worth it as a means of avoiding said pain.
I'm obviously more paranoid; I keep backups of all files. What happens if they become unavailable for some reason?
Backing up is easy if you don't have much to back up. There has never (during the last 35 years) been a backup solution for home enthusiast that has had a lot of stuff to backup (atm some 25+TB's)
The only way that would happen is if Daz were to go out of business. And as with Hivewire3D, we receieved proper advanced notification of such, and at that point I backed up my purchased products. I simply cannot back up nearly 2TB of assets that I can just redownload. I have no reason to believe Daz is going to go the way of the dodo. My backup (of everything else) is large enough as it is.
Currently I backup to a cloud with Carbonite - automatically, and it has saved my behind numerous times as it has backed up things I wouldn't have thought to back up. I also back up locally on a weekly schedule to a 4TB internal SSD with Acronis. Lastly, I back up my operating system drive to Norton's cloud in the unlikely event something ever happens with ransomware, etc. I could probably just quit with Acronis and use Norton to run my local backup set, but I have a perpetual license so I keep it. It's a good program that can also do full drive images (clones), including bootable drives, and I also like the incremental backup option.
Yes, I followed cris' advice and took out a Backblaze subscription and it is easily able to handle the Daz zips - though it took about three months to fully back up my full system (I had it do the actual documents first, then added my downloads once it was done with that).
If the drive is still "visible" to the computer, even if it can't seem to access it, you might check and see if a partition needs a letter reassigned. You might be able to research DiskPart and use that to see if the computer can see it. If it's completely invisible, then I'm not sure what to suggest.
Recently my Windows 7 OS drive crashed and I had to reinstall Windows. Luckily it still recoginized the drive (after several hoops) and was able to recover the data after jumping through a lot of hoops and getting it to copy the files over to an external. Then a friend's OS drive crashed on Windows 10 and we did something similar. He lost part of his data, but it looks like it was a case of the drive had been partitioned, and something caused one of those partitions to get dropped. The remaining data was still present. In both those cases, though, the computer wouldn't boot to Windows, and there were some hoops to jump through to get it to finally see the harddrive.