Bad, Bad Day

[filkertom]

External hard drive crash. Not sure how bad yet. Have to check if I backed up iTom songs. I DID back up most everything else about a week and a half ago; I don't THINK there's anything completely irreplacable. But it went down from a stupid chain of events I had no control over, and I'm not happy. More later.

Comments

If I can be of assitance...

[nimitzbrood.livejournal.com]

Blech. You have my sympathies. Drive failures are bad. :-( I hope you can at least get some of the data back or had good backups.

I've spent the last 15+ years fixing/repairing/working with computers so if you need a hand diagnosing I might be able to help.

[scott644.livejournal.com]

eek! Good luck dude - crashes are a royal pain.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

I think the heatwave is responsible. Lots of folks have had meltdowns lately. Heck, in my house, both laptops, the main computer and the PDA all failed within a couple of days last month. The only thing that didn't die was the lab computer (which was off the entire time).

The next computer is going to have a RAID1 array.

Also, you can pull the recent stuff back off the server and onto the computer.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Dunno. What specifically happened was: FireFox decided to crash -- I was trying to download an 8-Pack of loops from acidplanet.com, and it just hung, which is really weird as I've been using the site successfully for five years. Then I decided to reboot, and it took several moments to do so because the .NET framework (aah, thou scumbucket .NET framework, how I hate thee, but some shit won't install without thee) wouldn't close.

I stepped away for a minute while it rebooted, coming back just in time to not be able to stop as it told me it had to verify one of my external drives -- the one I'd been recording with earlier in the day. (Commission job -- thank Cthulhu I'd finished it and got the final high-quality MP3 out.)

It started nuking indexes and finding files it couldn't save -- literally saying it was going to retrieve this file, ohp, sorry, insufficient disk space. (Bull fucking shit. I've got 50+ GB free on this drive. I have 50+ GB free on other drives.) And then it just seemed to sit there. I eventually rebooted, and it wanted to go through the whole thing again. After a third time, I let it.

And now I've unleashed Stellar Phoenix on it, but even that worthy program is taking a hell of a long time to sort through things. I'm very glad I have a laptop; very glad most of my stuff was backed up; hope I don't lose the things I do need.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

Sounds to me like the drive lost the ability to write to the platter. You can sometimes restore this by putting the drive in the refrigerator for an hour (add 1/2 hour if it's in a case) and trying again. If this works, then that disk is on its very last legs and needs replacing immediately. Burn all crucial data to a DVDr as soon as the drive is functional again.

The trick doesn't always work - 50/50 chance. But I'll keep my fingers crossed.

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

I've tried it a time or three, and it's worked a couple of times. I stick my sticky drives in the freezer. Problem is that you have to keep it dry- humidity can mess it up worse when you take it out.

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

Crashes are Not Fun. It's possible that something glitched up your USB drivers, since this is an external drive.

Sounds like you have some local brainpower to apply to it, but I'll be happy to help out, too.

And when you can, get yourself a Buffalo TeraStation. They're not horribly expensive, and hold a lot of data.