ul:(

I feel your pain. When i was around 13 years old and played dune 2 religiously, one day all my 100+ savegames vanished because of some stupid mistake. dropped a few tears and went for a walk, still haunts me until today.

:(((((((

oh well, theres always tomorrow.

:'(

Had the same shit a couple of months ago... lost about 150gb music, a whole bunch of design work i've made for the past 6 months and a couple of songs i've made too. I was like "fuck this" and didn't start my computer for almost a week.

You become famous when dead, do I need to say anymore?

Buy DVD writer, buy bulk pack of DVDR's, backup important stuff

Easy :)

easy if you have money :(

Cheapest I've seen a DVDRW for is £40 (524 SEK). Disks are cheaaaaaaap now.

If you don't have the money to back it up, don't complain when a hard disk dies :(

For example, if you bought a car but then couldn't afford to fix it what was the point in having the car in the first place? =P

well... thats a good price exept that we add the swedish taxes and shipping costs and tax on the shipping and so on... and your example with the car, what was that all about? of course i can whine for my disk breaking down. i can also complain about not having money for backup stuff!

Im not sure what the example was for, it sounded good in my head!

Sure, whine away :)

wow that sucks, ul dude. my deepest sympathies.

My hd spun down one day and didn't spin back up. I had lots of stuff in there, demos, mp3s but most important of all IRC logs and 2 years worth of digital camera pictures. I knew my hd would die sooner or later but I kept saying that i'll do a backup tomorrow and then tomorrow and then tomorrow. Luckily, in a moment of brilliance i didn't remove the hd from my pc and 3 days later the hd spun back up! (it was totally dead those 3 days). I quickly saved as much as I could and 20 minutes later the drive died for good. Backup is the key word here.

Close call, well played :p

gg

Emotionally connecting to computer stuff? I do not mean to be rude, but you should get a life =]

yep that didn't sound rude at all

Artwork / content / media / whatever that you have spent some time creating and refining does grow on you, whatever the media used :>

computer stuff? well, what differs "computer stuff" from other stuff? i guess you would be a bit sad if 1000+ hours of work was destroyed? no? well, you might just be one of those really coldblooded people

after reading this message, i did a backup of all my config files :)

Yeah, the primordial stuff first !

ehmmm this thread s making me scared about whatever harddisk i have spinning in my laptop right now... well, i dont suppose dell would let its customers down, go to dell.com - theres an orgasm of bs there wherever 'customer support' is written. in any case, hope its true...
majunior - the key word in ur situation was that u were lucky as hell :D good for u, hope u managed to backup whatever u could.

Broken down? Unless you managed to physically destroy the disk platters, you should take it to your nearest data recovery business and get it all copied to another drive or disk. Broken drives are the reason these companies exist. Just because it's not spinning doesn't mean all your data is actually gone.

New Comment #10 @ 18:33 CET, 1 Feb 2005

By Jockos - Reply to #7

easy if you have money :(

I'm pulling it - it's not that expensive as far as I remember, but I guess it depends on how severe the damage is.

What do these companies do if they recover a disk full of illegal software? :P

Most of them offer confidentiality agreements of some sort.

money money money, must be funny, in the rich man's world.

Not my trouble.

LOL :D

An ad for a backup software package (can't remember which) used to say :
"There are two kinds of people :
Those who have lost data, and those who will."

The HDs in the two desktop macs my dad owned died a "natural" death after 4 years of use each roughly. Both times he took the machine to the store's data recovery service and came back with all his stuff on some removable media and lived happily ever after !

Also, rewritable media is your friend for regularly backing up stuff that is being worked on / updated.
For example, I don't generate that much data, so every second week or so I burn my browser / mail / itunes / whatever prefs / savegames / and some misc files etc to one or two cdrws (duplicate). Once in a while when I get some more sensitive files coming in (work files), I do the same process, except I make a CDR backup of that from time to time (I really don't have that much files piling up so burning a cd every month or two months is still ok-ish).

Umm, Secondary hard discs are cheap as hell these days, so there is no real excuse.
Also, you can attach 10 meg attachments to yahoo and mail them to yourself.
How big are your work files, the rest is probably shit like MP3's and movies you can get back within a few days.

Always install a secondary HD, with no boot partition, then just use it to backup important files.

It's simple, but we've all lost data.

By the way, if you know what you're doing you can EASILY recover you stuff. Send it to me and I'll get your work back and upload it for you.

I'll charge 20 euros plus P+P.

Sounds like the common hd breakage is quite benign :) I wish they explained cool things like that in those old hacking / phreaking publications :>

How can you easily recover data on a disk that's not found in BIOS or windows, or in fact not spinning at all?

it happened in prior to a power shutdown, meaning that some electrical spike must have killed it.. can you really fix problems like that? if thats the case please tell me how because its really important to me.

It's normally just the controller board that goes, swap it with one from an identical drive and it's usually fine again. If you can find one, that is.

If it doesn't spin at all, I usually just give it a good knock from the side. I know it sounds weird, but it's worked about twenty times for me (customers who bring in dead hard drives - data recovery place usually charge per MB). Just smack it quite hard with your palm on the side of the drive (not the top or bottom!). You usually get one more boot out of it, so be ready to copy off your stuff.

Disclaimer - if it doesn't work, don't blame me. Could be something else wrong with your drive, just giving you my personal experiences.

Well, something I have done in the past was to buy an identical HDD and swap various components over.
it is hard to say without looking at it.

Chances are it is a MECHANICAL FAULT, therefore the data is in fact perfectly fine, people just assume that it is not.

I had the same problem, I had files on there THAT WERE TOO IMPORTANT to go to waste, I did loads of research even got quotes off companies who do this professionally, but like most things in the computer world people want to totally rip you off.

I cant really explain for you how to do it here, its not that sort of job. It's not like replace R_mode 2 with R_mode 4 and you get a sharper res you know.

wishful thinking eh? :) I know how it feels to lose treasured data. I feel for you.

its just stuff

i stuffed you mom last night so stfu

ofc