External HD Question

[Yrzuli]

I've never had a harddrive fail... but I think my external just died on me.

A couple weeks ago my computer started being really slow to boot (6mins+) and after doing some research I saw that sometimes externals can cause slow boot times. Plus, I was having issues accessing one particular folder on the drive, so I decided to unplug it unless I absolutely needed it. Which means I've been living off of Pandora, rather than my near 80g music vault. Ugh.

Today I decided I was fed up with Pandora and plugged the external in. Immediately it started making a sound like the disk was slipping while spinning, and a Windows message popped up about needing to format it. Needless to say, seeing that caused my heart to drop. This drive is only 3 years old (I think...) and I'd gotten the external because I was tried of swapping slave drives when I changed computers (some of this data has been through 4 or 5 HDs).

So now, am I fucked or could it be salvageable? And for future knowledge... I need recommendations on backing up my hard drive. Aside from the music which would take me so very long to redo, I'm freaking out about losing almost 20 years of stories and crap that I've been writing since I was in high school. *super sad face*

Help! *flail*

[Krinathalasa]

My professor gave me some words of wisdom when it came to hard drives: They are either dying or they are dead.

I know there is software out there that can peel data from a hard drive. What that is I don't know. You can always hit up a local computer store to see if they can recover data from a corrupted hard drive.

When you plug in the hard drive do you have the ability to access it at all or are you always prompted to be formatted by Windows? Have you tried plugging it into another computer to see if you get the same error?

Try this site: http://www.ehow.com/how_4474341_recover ... drive.html

Pretty much everything I've read says you need to be a 3rd party software to recover what data you can. Just hope the file structure wasn't hosed.

http://www.brighthub.com/computing/smb- ... 42446.aspx

That site tells you what happened and what not to do for recovery. Hope this helps.

[Pincus]

I'd also try to get my hands on a Knoppix bootable Linux CD. Chances are a tad better you can use said CD to pull an image of the drive off and then work with it there.

[Krinathalasa]

I have one of those around here somewhere. It is handy to have.

[Grolish]

Online backup services are an option to consider going forward. Carbonite is one company that provides this service that I've heard good things about. I can't vouch for them personally, though.

http://www.carbonite.com/en/default

Cost looks to be about $60 per computer per year with no storage limits. There are other advantages to online back-ups as well: Access to your data from your smartphone / other computers is a big one.

I hope you can get all of your data back!

[Duskheron]

For the external HD, I've looked into it before, and the costs were never worth it for what I had on them (ie, nothing that was work/life critical, mostly just *cough*torrent files*cough*). I had this awesome 2Tb external HD that I'd moved a bunch of non-critical space-wasters to. I loved it. And then my cat head-butted it off my desk onto my tiled floor, and the movie I was watching just sort of twitched, and stopped working.

So I yelled at the cat, who promptly scurried off back to the bedroom where she usually hangs out, and then I just stared at the little HD laying on the floor convulsing, making that noise, thinking about the 200 bucks I'd spent on it less than 4 weeks prior. I put it out of its misery (unplugged it) and tossed it into the trash, with a firm decision to only buy internal HDs from here on out. Discounting the little thumbdrives, which are big enough/cheap enough to fulfill all my mobile needs.

For future needs, Grolish's idea is a good one. I currently use a similar thing called Dropbox, which is free for the first 2G, works for both PCs and Macs, and has iPhone/Android apps if you want to selectively sync file to your phone also. If you need more than 2G of space, you can either get it through a referral program (up to 8G), or pay for it (50G of space for $99/year). I've been using the free version for a couple years now, and happily recommend it. This is where all my critical work and personal files live, safe from bad kitties or lightning storms.

I use it to transfer files from home to work and back again daily. It syncs in the background, so I don't have to manually upload/download. All I do is place the files into that folder, and it happens auto-magically. My coworkers maintain a shared folder, so it works well for collaborating on documents, with a built in versioning system in case conflicts arise if 2 people open a document at the same time.

Here's a referral link (*shameless self-plugging to get myself more free space ;) ): http://db.tt/LKEFW1K

[Ashenfury]

I think Pincus offers your best free choice right now. It's amazing how stupid windows becomes with a hard drive stamped for windows (in the first partition or the headers). Basically windows is confused about the drive and refuses to mount/open it.

If you go the bootable linux route make sure you have another media you can place your salvaged files on. Otherwise put the hard drive into a linux machine. Chances are pretty solid that you'll be able to grab everything you want and maybe even play with it. There are free open source programs for linux that will allow you to recover just what you want (instead of sifting through 10,000 gif files only wanting 1 photo).

[Yrzuli]

Okay, think I'm going to see if I can get my hands on a Linux disc (the site for Knoppix said that the latest version is available with next month's Linux Mag).

Dropbox definitely looks awesome...

[Grolish]

I've been using Dropbox for a couple months now. Great way to keep files in a common location, or move files from machine to machine if they're too big for e-mail and you don't want to mess around with ftp. That free 2 Gb fills up fast though.