I swear to fucking god! This is starting to piss me off!
 

I posted this on another board, but I'm pissed off today so I'm posting it here as well.

Anyway, almost 2 weeks ago my motherboard fried so I had to buy a new one. Not so bad since it was easily fixed. All was running perfectly fine. No hard drive problems, no video card problem, no cpu problem, no power supply problem etc..

So last night I decide to reboot my computer which is nothing dangerous. Well look at that, my D: drive (Slave hard drive with ALL my work shit and other important stuff on it) does not get detected. Of course, I could not get into windows due to this since the windows installation was done on the C: drive, but I installed ALL the programs that would normally be in c:\Program Files into D:\Program Files. It also put other windows things onto that drive.

So I turned my PC off, took the hard drives out, checked the jumpers, the IDE cable and the power cable. All appeared fine. I plug everything back in and still the same problem. Still no D:.. arggg.. I decide to try it in the Secondary IDE channel to see if it work.. I set it as master, plug it in, restart the PC and.... NOTHING!

At this point I'm panicking. It's almost 5am now so I say fuck it and go to bed hoping that when I get up things will get back to normal. Boy was I wrong.. Anyway, after I tried a few time again when I got up I decided to try it on my brothers computer. This way I can see if it's a hard drive thing or a motherboard thing.. Just wanted to be 100% sure. So I plug my hard drive into my brother's PC and it doesn't get detected so now I know 100% that it's the hard drive that's fucked.

Now I'm way beyond panicking because EVERYTHING that I need is on that hard drive. I can't use data recovery software because it will not work if the hard drive is not detected by the bios so I scrapped that idea and here I am now after reinstalling windows xp on the good hard drive still trying to figure out wtf I can do to get all my stuff back. Using a data recovery company would work, but it's not in my budget to do that. If it was I would do that instantly because I NEED to get all the files from that hard drive or at least my work folder which is over 60GB.

It seems that my bad luck never ends. 1 thing goes right in my life and everything else goes to hell.

oh, on another note.. Tonight, the Subwoofer for my computer speakers stopped working lol

I wonder what the nect thing to fuck up will be.

not to be rude but if your data is important you should have a second copy of it i do images of my main 2 drives every 2-4 weeks so the most i can loose is 4 weeks of new shit.

Relax Yngwie

Sometimes life goes like that ,then it takes a turn and all is good :)

oh I know.. my plan was to buy more blank dvds so I could burn it all and keep it safe and when I would have the $ I was going to buy 1 or 2 more hard drives and make mirrored backups on both, but disk failure beat me to it.

That's the point, my life has been going the bad route for more years than I can remember.

sorry to hear about your loss i learned that lesson back in 2002 lost a hd guess now you will understand the extra $60 is worth it for backups.

Then you're doing something wrong mate.
I suggest you change your lifestyle.

Some times just because a hard drive wont boot up dont mean its lost forever.
Some times you can hook it up as a secondary and access it through the primary hard drive to recover your data.
I've done this on many occasions.

maybe you can try of those hd enclosures that works on usb... you never know

One thing you can try is buy the same make and model of the hard drive and once you have done that you can take the bottom circuit board and replace it on the hard drive that is not working. It is possible the hard drive and the platters are fine it is just the circuits on the board on the hard drive are not working.

This is a simple thing to do since you are not opening the hard drive.

Good luck. :thumbsup

It's not that the hard drive doesn't boot up.. It doesn't get detected by the bios which mean a) it's not get power due to an electrical problem within the hard drive. (not the problem in this case) or b) something to do with the platters and the other parts in the hard drive..

Usually I hear the hard drive spinning, but not anymore.

I've thought about that, but the hard drive does get power, but it doesn't spin. I tried an technique most would say is crazy (putting the drive in a zip lock bag than put it in the freezer).. I kept it in there for 2 hours, took it out, plugs it back in and the bios read it so I loaded up windows on the c:, but the d: did not show up. Wasn't in the device manager or anywhere.

So, since freezing it did make the bios detect it it's safe to say that it's not a circuit board problem. More than likely the platters in this case.

I thought about that and that may actually work. I will have to see if I can get one. Right now I have no cash to spare so while I wait I will keep trying other ways to get the data back. As long as I can get the data back I'll be happy.

Got cliff notes?

cliff notes:

hard drive with all my important shit failed.. can't access my work shit.. uh oh.. shit!

fuck yngwie that sucks!!!

hope you can sort something out man

external HDs man... I had this happen to me about 4 years ago and have been paranoid about my data ever since.

I got more external drives, DVD back ups, memory sticks with all my important shit on them than I can count...I got back ups of back ups of back ups....

you only learn the lesson once, then the problem never happens again... good luck :)

Just so you know, data recovery places can easily run in to the thousands of dollars. Sorry to hear about your loss.

Agreed 100%. External HDs will save your ass 1 day. It happened to us and thank god for the external HD. Its well worth the $150.

ya, this is why a data recovery place is not an option right now.

A second HD in the same machine is not a safe way to back up data. I did that and learned my lesson the hard way. I had a power supply go bad and it fried the entire PC including both HD's.

true but for someone on a budget its much better then nothing which is what he has right now.

also you can allways unplug the hd from power except for the times your doing backups.

Only way it would be safe is if it was a external HD they he could unplug.

Reminds me to do a backup

well, as soon as I can get my data back I will be backing up a whole lot more than I ever have. I don't want this to happen again and leave me screwed.

I just wanna know which one is the 'fucking god' ? Because, I feel like I might be inclined to pray to that one.

take it to a pro, pay the bill. it sucks, but you can eat Ramen noodles for a week to get your shit back. a pro can open it and put it in a new drive that works. like surgery

he's the other invisible on that lives next door to the other invisible man that people pray to.

as much as I want to do that when I say I don't have the $ I mean I don't have the $. If I did I would use it for this, but I don't have a cent to use. For my drive it would cost no less than $800, but more than likely much more.

Google cache is my backup :)

If google cached some of the stuff on the bad hard drive it would be a big problem.. There's also personal stuff on there.. me, my gf and that shit haha.

like it's been said. You just learned the hard way. Backups. PERIOD.

the hard way for sure.. won't happen again.

every nite for me

I had an IDE cable go bad on me a few months back, for no reason at all. Replaced it and never had a problem again, easy cheap fix. Maybe try a brand new cable if you haven't already.

Damn that sucks..hope you find a data recovery company that wont charge an arm and a leg

I just had the HD at my dedicated server host crash, and I had no backups.... now trying to piece 3 months of work back together from google caches.... very depressed, lost some good backlinks too :( :(

WHy isn't this posted on a tube somewhere then? :) :1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

lol I make sure that it's not haha

You should upgrade your drives to SATA. No jumps and no fucking around + they're hot swappable.
You can get good data recovery software that works very well also, so dont panic!

I think I used this in the past and it worked great http://www.getbackdata.net/ for exactly the same problem you described. Basically the hard drive had died, but I could still get the data off it using that software.