hard drive dead - lost 180+ gigs video

[proxyx99]

Weird, only one post from the original poster about the problem(?). No more info, details etc. Most HD failures are due to FAT errors, overlapping partitions, ghosts etc. If the drive is physically in OK condition (works and heads are not crashing, grinding) it is still recoverable. I've seen quite a few "failures" like that and have to say that with some patience and good tools like Ontrack stuff (+ Norton disk doctor, diskedit) lots can be recovered (if not almost all). 100% recovery is usually unlikely. From my experience drives usually give signals (by developing bad sectors) that it is a high time to back up. I was able to recover all but 1 HD failures (and this one only due to lack of time). Never had a HD that stopped spinning. That leads me to believe that this failure is also recoverable... (hopefully).

Btw. great post above. Explains a lot.

[jlietz]

Well, got the replacement drive from WD. No luck with the freezing technique, however. Still makes the same general noise, except now it sounds like frozen parts clicking (more metallic sounding than before.) I now officially consider myself S.O.L.
Thanks.

[dallastx]

Ive had a 200 gb WD hardrive fail on me twice. The first time i had about 140gigs and woke up the next moning to retrive a file and i got error message saying drive not formatted. I have ontrack and like stated in previous post, it dosent recover everything. I reformatted and thought maybe i had a virus or something although i have 3 other drives that work perfectly fine. 3-4 months later same thing happen. Error saying i need to reformat drive all of a sudden . After that time i partioned it into 3 drives. And guess what it didnt fail, but one day i was just seeing what i had stored and my files where all mixed up in diffrent folders. And like i said i have other hardrives that work perfect since day one on the same computer. WHo knows. Kinda of strange though, that most people with hardrive problems have a WD 160gb and up. I bought a maxtor external 200 gig a month ago and havent had any problems so far.

[hhhhbk]

sympathies to anyone who loses a hard drive
it is so frustrating to lose lots of data

my housemate killed a couple of ibm 120Gigs and sent them back
i was amazed that they were replaced under warranty

im thinking of opting for raid 0 (i think) two identical hard drives all data is written to both

my housemate got this freaky £500 raid card which you put disks in arrays of 4 hard drives 3 are written on one is parity and then if one of the drives die you can place a new Hard drive in its place and it gets rebuilt
i hope they come down in price
i love the idea as media on hard drive is better than having it on stacks of cds and dvds
just hope the card comes down in price (sure it will in a year or 2)
the guarauntee of never losing data would be great