Catastrophic HD failure

[Lord_Rat]

I don't know why I decided to give Western Digital another chance last year. Their hard drives don't like me or something.

At any rate, I had a RAID 0 array of 4 Velociraptor 10k rpm SATA II drives and last night, I went home to find my computer displaying this message:

"No bootable device detected"

I opened the RAID manager and one of the drives listed as "Error".

No amount of fiddling, cable swapping or rubbing it gently caused it come back to life. It's dead.

For the most part, it was an inconvenience. I lost a few digital pictures, some LightWave models I was working on and all my save games for anything not Steam-Cloud enabled.

But it always sucks to go home to a dead computer.

I did the reinstall jig last night. Had to start with Vista and then do Win 7 because the Win 7 is an upgrade version.

But I got it all done.

Le sigh.

[CVMichael]

Can you post an ATTO benchmark screen shot of your RAID 0 hard drives ?

[Lord_Rat]

They're not raided now. When I rebuild it, I decided to leave them as individual drives. It's my experience that once one goes bad, the others are usually fast to follow and so I didn't want to raid it again for the moment.

Sorry =(

I'm not sure how much I really trust the Windows 7 Benchmark but they were rated as 7.1 in the Windows "experience" rating system.

As individuals, the main is 5.8 now. (But I don't really care about the Windows Experience score.)

[EntityX]

I've heard that there are services that can get the data off a "dead" hard drive. If you need what was on the drives it could be worth it. Don't know what they charge for those services or if they are always successful.

I had a hard drive die in 2005. I lost hundreds of digital pictures that I really liked. I think it might have been a Western Digital hard drive. I'm thinking it probably was but am not completely sure.

[Lord_Rat]

They charge a lot. I have a few pictures saved and I'm not the uber-sentimental type.

I may be a bit strange in how I feel, but overall pictures are for remembering the past, but if you need to have books and books of pictures, there's something wrong with the present. (And I hope that what's wrong isn't that someone is missing from life.)

I'll take some more, back them up better and move on with my life. No picture comes even close to the hugs I get from my kids in real life.

And I do have some backed up, so all was not lost.

[CVMichael]

Why not RAID 1 ?

I have 4 HDs on my PC, 2 * 1TB as RAID1, and 2 * 1.5TB as RAID1. (I also have a 240GB RevoDrive SSD as my C drive)

The 1.5TB HDs I get really good transfer rates, up to 120MB/Sec (if I remember correctly, I'm not home right now to double check)

Windows Experience just gives you a score, use ATTO Disk Benchmark, it gives you the actual transfer rates...

[Lord_Rat]

Part of the reason is that Windows 7 doesn't recognize the on-board raid. The whole time I had it, it was listed as "unknown device" yet the logical drives were still readable. But I suspected the whole time that I might not have been getting the performance I should have. And I couldn't find drivers that worked properly.

ASUS Revolution Motherboard (Don't remember which exactly).

Can you recommend a good physically-inserted RAID card that's Win 7 compatible and SATA II? I might consider getting it. Pop it in to a PCIE-X slot, plug the drives and go to town! Yee haaa!

[BackWoodsCoder]

They may sound odd, but there's a few unconventional methods of getting a HD to spin up so that you can recover lost data. One of the most common methods I've seen is sticking the HD in the freezer for a little while, if you're having a problem with overheating this will at least give you some time to access the drive before it errors out again.

Last resort was to actually remove the hard drive cover and try spinning the platters manually with a soft object (qtip, felt, anything but your finger) and hoping it would catch and begin to spin at operating speed. Unfortunately this usually voids any warranty and you must work very fast as having an exposed drive doesn't leave you much time before dust and other things settle onto the platters. It's definitely not the safest method, but it has worked.

[Nightwalker83]

I don't know why I decided to give Western Digital another chance last year. Their hard drives don't like me or something.

Yeah, I have had problems with Western Digital hard drives too! Years ago I bought one and it only lasted about 6 months before It would no longer decided to register that it was plugged in to a computer.

[gep13]

Since there is useful information in this thread, going to move it over to the General Developer Forum.

Gary

[dilettante]

Looks more like General PC to me.

[gep13]

Looks more like General PC to me.

Doh!! You are quite correct! In my head, that is where I was moving it, but it didn't quite get there

Will move again.

Gary

[Lord Orwell]

Part of the reason is that Windows 7 doesn't recognize the on-board raid. The whole time I had it, it was listed as "unknown device" yet the logical drives were still readable. But I suspected the whole time that I might not have been getting the performance I should have. And I couldn't find drivers that worked properly.

ASUS Revolution Motherboard (Don't remember which exactly).

Can you recommend a good physically-inserted RAID card that's Win 7 compatible and SATA II? I might consider getting it. Pop it in to a PCIE-X slot, plug the drives and go to town! Yee haaa!

you won't need sata-2 unless you're raiding ssds.

I have a couple of comments here: Asus onboard raid: The motherboard comes with a driver disk. You have to switch the sata ports into raid mode in the bios. Then reboot. Then load the bios again and set the array as your boot drive. Then reboot. Then launch raid manager from boot and set up the raid array. Then after you do this and reboot a 2nd time, you can then install your OS. ASUS raid isn't the easiest thing to configure. When your OS is installing, it will get to a point where it can't find the drives, UNLESS it already comes with raid drivers. At this point, insert the motherboard cd or a driver file on a usb stick and navigate to it. Note in xp you must use a floppy disk for this. After it loads the driver, it will see the drives and let you install the OS.

These steps all have to be done in order, even if you aren't raiding the boot drive, because it transfers control of the sata ports to the raid controller. All of them.

As for raid mode: If you want the speed boost, you can still have that with mirroring instead of striping. Modern controllers read mirrored arrays as fast as raid-0 arrays. Think about it. The data's on every drive.

They may sound odd, but there's a few unconventional methods of getting a HD to spin up so that you can recover lost data. One of the most common methods I've seen is sticking the HD in the freezer for a little while, if you're having a problem with overheating this will at least give you some time to access the drive before it errors out again.

Last resort was to actually remove the hard drive cover and try spinning the platters manually with a soft object (qtip, felt, anything but your finger) and hoping it would catch and begin to spin at operating speed. Unfortunately this usually voids any warranty and you must work very fast as having an exposed drive doesn't leave you much time before dust and other things settle onto the platters. It's definitely not the safest method, but it has worked.

freezing isn't recommended except as a final resort. It causes condensation. Plus opening the drive really doesn't hurt it. They aren't sealed anyway and dust is thrown off the platter on spin-up onto little tubes around it designed to catch the dust.

hard drives can be finicky beasts. While i've never had a wd fail on me, i have had to rme a seagate drive twice, and it still has three years of warranty left. Last time they gave me a remanufactured drive! I lost all data each time.

[tengo]

Decided to convert my 1TB portable to NTFS a few weeks ago (No idea why it was still FAT32 for so long, guess you always forget the simplest stuff eh?) using the Convert command in CMD.
Needless to say the 'infallible' convert method failed hard for reasons I'll never know and destroyed the FAT and corrupted a few sectors, Everything's still on there, I just have to guess the correct file sizes of thousands of unnamed clusters if I want it back.
No biggie, just hundred gbs of music, movies and TV Shows a 14-page project analysis and God knows how much college and photography work that, of course, wasn't saved anywhere else.
It's just sitting unplugged in the corner until I can be arsed to reformat it xD


This entire experience taught me:
TestDisk
and
Convar PC Inspector File Recovery.

Testdisk is especially useful for any troublesome HDD jobs and saving your arse if you've ruined the OS Install.

[Lord Orwell]

Decided to convert my 1TB portable to NTFS a few weeks ago (No idea why it was still FAT32 for so long, guess you always forget the simplest stuff eh?) using the Convert command in CMD.
Needless to say the 'infallible' convert method failed hard for reasons I'll never know and destroyed the FAT and corrupted a few sectors, Everything's still on there, I just have to guess the correct file sizes of thousands of unnamed clusters if I want it back.
No biggie, just hundred gbs of music, movies and TV Shows a 14-page project analysis and God knows how much college and photography work that, of course, wasn't saved anywhere else.
It's just sitting unplugged in the corner until I can be arsed to reformat it xD


This entire experience taught me:
TestDisk
and
Convar PC Inspector File Recovery.

Testdisk is especially useful for any troublesome HDD jobs and saving your arse if you've ruined the OS Install.

it should have taught you to back up.

[tengo]

Essentially, my portable was my back up, I don't have any drives that have nearly the amount of capacity that was used on that disk.
Although it did teach me to apply the theory of "data doesn't exist unless it exists in atleast three places" to important stuff and anything I've put time or effort into.

[Lord Orwell]

well it sounds to me like your portable was more than just backup if it had data that didn't exist anywhere else. I've moved my most important data to the cloud (dropbox). Off-site backup is the way to go. If your house burned down, or even what if you got a malicious software on your computer and it chose a time to erase all drives while the usb drive was connected?

After a near-scare with years of family tree research, it was decided to keep it in dropbox, and after two failures in a year of a hard drive, i now keep my program projects in it.