Three days ago one of my hard-drives decided it was time to stop working. The irony of the situation is that I was in the middle of backing up data off that drive when it stopped working. I was happily copying data from the disk to another system when I noticed that a couple of files weren’t copied because of read errors. At first I let the copy continue, then I thought let me run a disk check on the drive first and then I can copy data off. Bad Move.
Once I unmounted the drive none of the tools would recognize it and I couldn’t access any of the data on it anymore. I tried to make a disk image of the drive but even after letting the process run for 2 days it had only imaged 16 MB (The drive was 80 GB) so I cancelled it. If I had let the copy process run I guess I could have copied most of the data off it before it failed.
Now I can’t even get the system to identify the drive. I have a backup of most of the data so its not critical that I get access to the drive but its a good learning experience. So I am going to try freezing the drive and see if that will let me get the data off.
I will document my attempts and will share it over here over the next few days.
– Sur
umm you might want to try using different cables for the drive. Cable failure is number one cause of all electronic problems.
Comment by dude — October 4, 2008 @ 1:35 PM
Good suggestion. I will try that.
So far I haven’t gotten the time to try to recover the data from it but hopefully I will get some time this weekend.
Thanks for the suggestion.
Comment by Suramya — October 7, 2008 @ 11:50 PM