Hard Drive: Crash and Burn

[Ymir's blood]

Recently, I installed a second hard drive to use for music and whatnot. It took forever to get it working due to not being able to find the right parts to install it in the tower. Finally after many false starts, I got an external drive conversion kit and hooked it up using a USB cable.

Last night it was working fine but this morning it was dead. It didn't spin, although the case was still getting power as the light was on. Its failure caused the computer to lock up but after turning off the defunct drive, the system rebooted fine.

I opened up the external case and examined the hard drive. The plastic shell seems to have some rough patches near where the actual disk is. From that, I'm assuming that it overheated and died in the night.

Thankfully, there was a somewhat recent backup of MyDocuments and most of what was lost is replaceable. Still, the whole thing is just disheartening. I've no one to blame but myself. Just didn't think there would be a problem with it overheating as there was room for air to move around it and there wasn't a problem. Normally the system would be turned off at night, and the drive as well but something was downloading.

Not really seeking advice, though it wouldn't be unwelcome. Mostly just venting.

[J.T.]

I know how you feel. My back up drive was causing my computer to not see the main drive after 2 years of being installed. When I removed the back up drive, the computer wnt back to normal. However I have some stuff backed up on the back up that will take time to replace.

[pescifish]

My crashed hard drive is still waiting for me to take it to one of those disk restore places (maybe). Didn't help that I hadn't backed the stuff up for 9 months.

And the computer the drive came out of is waiting patiently for me to install and rebuild the system on the new harddrive I bought months ago. Too lazy to do anything else, I used the whole crash as an excuse to buy a new desktop computer.

I hope you can recover all your stuff and get yourself a good storage and backup setup asap, Ymir's blood.

[Legs]

Sorry Ymir's b, that was a really frustrating experience.

RIP to your hard drive

[curses]

That really sucks. But you know those songs are always replacable

[Ymir's blood]

My brother suggested that I set the possibly dead drive up internally again, temporarily. That would verify that the hard drive is the problem and not the external conversion kit. If it works, the important data could be transferred to the existing drive.

Originally Posted by pescifish

And the computer the drive came out of is waiting patiently for me to install and rebuild the system on the new harddrive I bought months ago. Too lazy to do anything else, I used the whole crash as an excuse to buy a new desktop computer.

I'm thinking of doing something similar. That would allow me to have a lot more internal hard drive space plus deal with the screwed up CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive as well. If that drive had been working properly, it would have been a lot easier to back up.

Originally Posted by minus

That really sucks. But you know those songs are always replacable

Most of what was lost were songs I'd ripped myself so that's not a problem. I've gotten back a lot of the downloaded ones already. What bugs me most about them is that there was supposed to be a backup. Blame it on operator error.

[Kyuss Apollo]

I feel your pain Ymir.

Currently we have a 320 gig hard drive in limbo. Stupid piece of crap Netgear toaster formatted this drive--somewhat buggy at times with this machine or that not being able to see it, but overall seemed to be working with a modicum of babysitting. So long story short, gigs and gigs later, toaster becomes toast. useless. After giving the drive over to my friend the archangelist, his final analysis is that nothing will see the data on there except...ANOTHER TOASTER. At some point we'll get another stupid toaster long enough to back all that shit off, then bring the toaster back for store credit and get a Slug...

Thats our plan, and we're sticking to it.