Crash Test Dumbass
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ffc what now
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Post by Crash Test Dumbass on Nov 6, 2017 18:32:12 GMT -5
I woke up this morning and my desktop wouldn't boot. I unplugged and let it sit, and then on repowering it, the SSD (that has the OS (Windows 7)) booted, but it couldn't see either HDD. I unplugged it and left it to go to work.
When I got home, it was having the same problem. I checked the BIOS and the BIOS could only see my optical drive, not any of the three hard drives. I moved some of the SATA cables around, but that didn't do anything either.
I took all three drives out of the machine and tested them on an external enclosure on my laptop. The drives would mount briefly, unmount just as quickly, bounce between states for a little bit, and then stop sending data at all. The HDDs were still spinning, but were otherwise completely mute. I tested another drive that I had laying around and that wouldn't read at all either, but it seems a little coincidental that my enclosure failed too, and I'm not sure the fourth drive was working properly to begin with.
I'm out of drives to test, and I don't know where to turn for help (besides, y'know, here). Is there any help for me at all?
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fab
TI Forumite
strange days
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Post by fab on Nov 8, 2017 12:20:01 GMT -5
hm, that's super weird.
if you have critical data on your drives, you may want to contact a reliable data recovery service -- preferably one that won't gouge you, as the data recovery industry can be... opportunistic, shall we say?
you can pay through the teeth for data recovery, and my understanding is that they'll never give you a guarantee on their ability to recover your data, while still being very comfortable with charging exorbitant fees. time is money and all that, and they know if someone (esp. a business) is up against the wall and didn't have proper backups, they can take them to the cleaners.
only other thing I could think to suggest would be to try another desktop with a different set of SATA cables. not that the cables should really make any difference -- mainly, you want to eliminate the quirks that might happen with external devices or enclosures by plugging things in more directly.
I'm just spitballing here and am not much of an expert in data recovery. the most advanced thing I've ever done was recovering data off of a RAID array after a contractor fucked up restoring the array when a disk died and he swapped a new one in. I stitched together a few of the raw VM disk images by reading some VMware documentation and getting some free open source tools, running the whole shebang off a live boot CD. not exactly the same scenario.
recovering from dead or dying drives is tough... you might want to mount them as read only in a *nix environment or similar in case something's going awry with the controller(s)? not sure.
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Post by Lord Lucan on Nov 8, 2017 15:32:27 GMT -5
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Crash Test Dumbass
AV Clubber
ffc what now
Posts: 7,058
Gender (additional): mostly snacks
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Post by Crash Test Dumbass on Nov 28, 2017 11:38:06 GMT -5
I don't really know what I did, but all three drives are working again. I borrowed a new enclosure from work, and it corrected errors on one of the HDDs and all three read just fine, so I hooked them back into my desktop machine and everything reads properly now.
I did make some adjustments in the case because the SATA cables looked like they were crimping, but that's about it. Here's hoping it stays that way.
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Post by Floyd D Barber on Nov 28, 2017 20:00:54 GMT -5
I don't really know what I did, but all three drives are working again. I borrowed a new enclosure from work, and it corrected errors on one of the HDDs and all three read just fine, so I hooked them back into my desktop machine and everything reads properly now. I did make some adjustments in the case because the SATA cables looked like they were crimping, but that's about it. Here's hoping it stays that way. I'm glad everything came back up. You might think about getting an external drive and doing a full backup just in case something crashes again. If they acted up once, it's possible they could again. Right now should be a good time to shop for drives. I think I got a 2 TB on black Friday a couple of years ago for around 70 bucks. I haven't checked any prices this year. Hope everything keeps working for you. |
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fab
TI Forumite
strange days
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Post by fab on Nov 29, 2017 4:39:22 GMT -5
yeah, the most important thing now is to back it all up and rotate your backups into a fireproof safe or something similar.
glad you got it working. data loss is painful!
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