hard drive failure - advice needed!

[stellar73]

Hi guys,

Had a massive disaster last night - all of a sudden without warning my new(ish) - around 9 months old - laptop flashed up a Windows warning saying the hard drive was failing, 10 mins later it crashed completely and will now not boot into Windows at all.

Hoping one of the techier members here can advise me as to whether I'm going through the right steps in trying to recover the data.

Initially it prompted me to run a Start up disc repair dialog which (after about an hour) returned the message that it had failed due to "bad hard drive" (slightly amused as those were the actual words in the report!)

From the same dialog I was then able to attempt system restore which failed.

I then burned an Ubuntu boot disc to see if I could 'see' my drives that way. Never used linux before but rather bizarrely it seemed to show the hard drive as being divided into 3 partitions (2 of just over 100g, 1 of 600 g). In actual fact it's divided into two - a C partition of 100g which has all my programmes and a D drive of 600ish which has all my data. Started to think it was an NFTS partition issue at this point. Ubuntu could not mount the 'D' drive at all and gave an error message similar to the below (pasted this one from a forum so it may differ v. slightly)

Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 13: ntfs_attr_pread_i: ntfs_pread failed: Input/output error
Failed to read NTFS $Bitmap: Input/output error
NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it's a
SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows
then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very
important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate
it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid' documentation
for more details

I then tried to run a linux fix for NFTS which I found on a forum which failed to work.

Removed the linux disc and re-started in safe mode with command prompt. This eventually opened the prompt but it literally took 5 hours to open as it sat for hours on a Windows initialisation screen. I attempted to run chkdsk for the C drive with the commands f/ and r/ (which I understand are to check the file system and repair it) but it said that "as the drive was in use" it would have to run on re-boot. I haven't re-booted yet for fear of it not working. I ran the same command for the D: drive and it has gone through the whole chkdisk thing seemingly successfully (ie the volume of files v free space I know I have correspond roughly to the figures that are appearing), it hasn't indicated it has repaired anything or found any errors.

Can anyone advise what I should do next? Are there any other commands I should try while I still have the command prompt open (terrified to close it and re-boot in case I cant get it back)

Cheers for any help!

 

[Edwin]

I wonder about the following:
Plug in an external hdd
Get some kind of self booting partition cloning software and use it to try and copy your data partition to the external hdd

Safer to try and get a fresh copy than fix a possibly very broken original

 

[AssetDomains]

There used to be a way to dismount the drive and scan may be dependent on the actual version of windows recovery tool.
Rather than full blown Linux I find tools on one of these much better to run disk checks data backups etc.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

If you have access to a desktop PC why not whip the laptop drive out and plug it in to run the scan

 

[stellar73]

Thanks both - sounds like good suggestions!

Will try the boot software - have never heard of partition cloning software but just googled and there seems to be various options.

Unfortunately I dont have access to a desktop PC so I guess will need to get a caddy from somewhere instead

On a side note if anyone is considering buying a budget (sub £400) Samsung laptop, DONT DO IT! This is the second Samsung that has died on me in a similar manner. The first one was a few years ago and it gave a "hard drive not found" message when I tried to turn it on after owning it less than a month. Thought that had a been a one off and couldn't possibly happen to me again....Only good thing is this again is still under guarantee and about 90% of my data was backed up, still lost quite a lot of recent work though which I could do without

 

[monaghan]

If you can't get the disk back with these tools, then search for a program called photorec, I've just used this on a failed Mac HDD and recovered about 800Gb of photos and videos from the failed external drive (it will read most disk formats, not just Mac). It will take a long time to run as it does raw disk reads and identifies content of the raw data and rebuilds files.

I've found in the past that using something like the ultimate boot disk and using a low level disk scan will refresh the disk long enough to get the critical data off, but if you can't attribute this to a software failure, I'd replace this disk and don't use it again even if you reformat it.

 

[AssetDomains]

Thanks both - sounds like good suggestions!

Will try the boot software - have never heard of partition cloning software but just googled and there seems to be various options.

Both boot CD's have an number of such tools I find I can sort most things using Parted Magic on the ultimatebootcd

 

[stellar73]

Thank you all, will keep you posted. Off to walk the dog now in a zombified state then hopefully catch a couple of hours sleep before attempting anything else.

Bloody computers eh!?

 

[Edwin]

The other thing to point out is that with the price of drives near an all time low there's really no reason NOT to have backups!

 

[stellar73]

The other thing to point out is that with the price of drives near an all time low there's really no reason NOT to have backups!

Very true - I was 90% backed up, just work from the last week really and a few other bits and pieces. But yeh 90% should be 100%

 

[Skinner]

I had a similar issue a few years ago where my Seagate Blackarmor Archive unit failed, coincidentally of the 5 seagate hard drives I bought at that time 100% are dead now, which is in contrast to the 4 Seagate SCSI drives which are at least 10 yrs old and run 24/7, my only conclusion is seagates gone to hell.

My research concludes IF the drive spins up and sounds "normal" then there is a good chance of it being recoverable however if the drive is totally dead, then you maybe able to replace the mainboard (easy to do but but hard to find a compatible board).

If you power it and it clicks (called the click of death) then the odds dramatically drop of recovery. If it scrapes and sounds that way odds are the heads crashed and is killing the platters.

The key part is to determine if its alive or dead, so a £15 enclosure from Maplin or half that if you can wait from ebay, set it up and see what sounds if any you are working with.

 

[Edwin]

If you're obsessive about backups (and/or your data is extremely precious to you) then a multi-tier strategy is best.

A) Second hdd (either physically in your machine, or attached to it)
B) Network attached hdd (hide it somewhere completely different in your house, assuming you can find some way to connect it up to the network) in case a thief breaks in and pinches your computer+backup drive. Alternatively, regularly backup to DVD/Blu-ray and hide those somewhere else.
C) Remote/online backup e.g. Mozy (for if your house burns down/gets flooded etc. and you lose both A) and B)

With the right backup software, the actual backup process can be 100% automated so it's just a question of assembling the right hardware and picking (and paying for) an online backup provider, and you're all set.

 

[Skinner]

I recommend using a NAS box, I'm using Synology at the moment for my back up solution.

Currently you can pick up 2 x WD Red 3TB hard drives at around £110 each, and a Synology 2 bay NAS for around £250, takes around 30 minutes to setup then around 6 hours to build the Raid 1 (Mirrored) Array then its ready to rock complete with Webserver PHP, MySQL and a bunch of extensions, DLNA Media Server, Photo Gallery, Wordpress etc so you can use it to test sites stream movies etc while its storing your back ups.

Using £7 Acronis software you can have your laptop automatically back up to the NAS, incrementally or image wise.

You can have all the machines in the house back up to it, even iphones and mobile phones anything.

You can add an additional layer to it like I have where I have a Hitachi Touro hard drive (same size of the NAS drive) which performs a disk image twice per week via USB 2 at the end of the 5m cable inside a locked cupboard. This runs automatically with free software with the NAS.

I would need to have 3 hard drives fail in 2 different locations to lose more than 3 days of data.

I keep looking at something like this http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005XMH8Z0/?tag=acorn06-21 which is fireproof, waterproof etc, they do a 2-5 bay NAS powered also by Synology too.

 

[Edwin]

A keen thief while your house is empty can still sink you if you don't have a completely off-site backup strategy as well. But I admit the NAS solution you outlined is pretty compelling!

 

[Skinner]

I keep looking at http://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/ as a method of off-site storage, otherwise transferring 100gb+ per month would be impossible.

HD Video and Raw Image files just eat space

 

[Edwin]

I have an account with Mozy with 276GB of backups in it, so there are other alternatives. Admittedly the first backup took a while, but after that it's all incrementals so it's not too bad. You're right, though - photos and videos gulp space like it's going out of fashion...

 

[Edwin]

Which Mozy service do you have? Does it support network drives? I looked at Mozy and Carbonite; the latter appears to throttle, particularly at over 200Gb. From what I have established so far none of the basic "home" services support uploading directly from anything other than local storage and the "pro" services charge a lot.

Mozy Home. No idea about network drives, I back up off the primary data hdd.

You could always back whatever you wanted to upload remotely to a local hdd first (off the network hdd, if you're using that for primary storage) and from there pop it into the cloud somewhere.

 

[wonder_lander]

I'm running Windows Home Server 2011 (WHS 2011) which wakes up all the PC's and Laptops overnight, backs them up and then puts them back to sleep.

I then have a NAS in a hidden location in the house and use Crashplan to handle the backup over to that.

My next step is that I'm going to get an external drive, use crashplan at home to take an initial image and then move the drive to my work PC, 50 miles from home, where it can be backed up to also overnight.

 

[Edwin]

Thanks, Edwin, I thought it probably was.



I'd not thought of that. I suppose a local HDD could be used as an intermediary. I've taken a look at Mozy Home's pricing. I don't know what you might be paying (it could well be less) but the service charges £7.99 for 3 PC's / 125Gb per month. Additional 20Gb storage is £1.75 per month. So based on that pricing your 276Gb will be costing you £7.99 + (8 x £1.75) to allow you a maximum of 285Gb. That's £21.99 per month or £263.88 per year. I doubt you're paying that, but I also doubt that you're paying $33.58 per year which is what you'd pay for 276Gb at Amazon Glacier. This includes upload costs. Where Glacier can become expensive is at retrieval time, especially if you need to retrieve a lot of the data very quickly. If you don't, and can retrieve it slowly over a period of time (and theoretically almost never because this should be your backup of a backup of a backup) you won't pay nearly as much.

Actually, I think I am paying about £22/month. My data's worth far, far more than that (to me).

 

[Skinner]

The fastest upload speed I can get at home is 1 megabit up, without going to Virgin but I object to their plans for things like cview (data packet analysing).

You have not factored in Traffic Management which essentially nukes you after a few gig more than about 10gb a day consistently and virgin will kick your teeth in.

http://my.virginmedia.com/traffic-management/traffic-management-policy-thresholds.html

Most ISPs have similar upload limits, so yay you can have 100mbps line but if you try and use it we'll beat ya up

I just did the mathematics. 100Gb (Gigabytes) = 102,400Mb (Megabytes). I could upload at 15Mbps (15 Megabites per second) on ordinary fibre broadband from BT or others (I know one small ISP that offers fibre and also doesn't count uploaded data in any monthly limits).

1Mbit (Megabit) = 0.125Mb (Megabyte). Let's reduce 15Mbit upload to 10Mbit to allow for downtime. At 10Mbit per second I can upload 1.25Megabytes of data (10 x 0.125Mb = 1.25Mb). In 60 seconds that's 75Mb. In 1 hour that's 4500Mb (~4.5Gb). I'd be able to do over 100Gb in 24 hours on that connection or is my mathematics wrong?

 

[aZooZa]

I use 5.25" floppies but I'm careful to rotate them every other week.

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