Hard Drive Clicking!!! Please Help!!!

[Tatsuya Graham]

OMG!!!!! Oh My GOSH!!!

My harddrive is clicking and whirrling and won't start up?????Is there anyway to retreive my files on it? OMG, That is my whole lifes work on their!!!


I am so scared....Im like paniking....

CAN ANYBODY HELP ME!!! PLEASE!!

[Brian Keith Moody]

Sounds like your hard drive is crashing or has already crashed. Is it still under warranty? If so, you can call the company and ask for advice. Do you have any diagnostic tools you can run directly from a CD (for example, Norton Utlities or other disk rescue software)?

Another thing you can do is call someone (if you can afford it) and have them come over. Some computer stores will send someone out for about $50 bucks an hour (depending on your area) to take a look at your system and advise you first hand. They may even fix it.

Files can be retrieved from a crashed drive but a professional will have to do it and it can get very expensive to do so.

Good luck. This should teach us all to back up files often.

[Chris Soucy]

I presume (perhaps incorrectly) that this is (one of) the hard drives in your NLE system?

1. Stop panicking

2. Power off system (front and back switches but do not disconnect mains cable from system or wall socket)

3. Pop side/ top panel off case.

4. Disconnect both power and data cables from affected drive.

4a. Don't touch anything without grounding yourself to metal case.

5. Check for bent, broken pins on all connectors.

6. Re - connect all cables, making sure alignment is correct and they are all pushed fully home. Check cables to both power supply and motherboard to ensure they too are correctly seated.

7. If the affected drive is your C drive and you have a D drive, disconnect your D drive from both power and data cables (in case it's dragging the C drive down).

8. Turn on rear power switch then your front power switch.

9. If it comes up, well done

10. If it doesn't, and the drive hasn't "spun up" (it'll whirr softly if it's spinning) give it a short, sharp whack with the side of your hand (do not use a blunt instrument!).

11. If it still hasn't come up, revert to Panic mode.

Good luck.

[Matt Newcomb]

Clicking is generally a sign of hard drive failure. If this as life and death as you say it is then call a specialist, it might be a little spendy but they can usually retrieve a good majority of everything on the drive.

[Ash Greyson]

Clicking is generally worse case scenario. Most the time, a specialty service like disksavers, etc. can recover much of the data but be prepared to spend $1000 - $5000. This is THE thing that is going to hamper the tapeless era. HDD are just not archival, nor will they ever be until everything is flash based.

Dont feel too bad, there is not a soul who has done this for long who hasnt lost stuff forever. For me, I generally shoot to tape on anything that I want to archive, then keep project files on a mirrored raid and another redundant physical back-up.



ash =o)

[Paul Mailath]

don't go pulling anything to bits unless you know what you're doing. turn the computer off and contact a REPUTABLE computer company who can try to recover the data. There are companies who can dismantle the drive in a clean room but it's expensive. I worked in IT for 14 odd years and I'd never hit a drive with anything, even my hand

It's a bad noise and a gut wrenching feeling as any computer programmer will tell you.

I hope you can recover at least some of the data but the big lesson for everyone is BACK IT UP -if you can afford to lose it then take the risk - if you can't (refer to the above).

Hard drives are relatively cheap, there's no reason you can't get an older desktop and throw some big drives in and use it for archival storage.

I've been there and I feel your pain

[John Hotze]

I think you will wind up needing to get your system into a technicians hands. I certainly will admit I'm not a super brain on this stuff but I have been working on computer hardware for over 37 years & have seen a lot and been through a lot of disasters. I've seen head crashes on main frame disk storage at banks where the operator put in the father and grandfather backups into a drive with a crashed head. Banks don't like it when they lose data.

The best thing to do on your own is to start listing data, not programs that is really vital to you that was on the drive. When a crash occurs, it's normal for us to panic but when you boil it all down, frequently it's not a life or death situation. List what data really can't be recovered that is vital. Start taking steps to recover what is important via paper trails, etc.

After the dust has settled and you want to go futher without getting an outside tech involved, you need to pull that drive out (I'm assuming you only have one drive). You need to know what the drives interface is. If it is a fairly new system from the past year or two, it could be a sata drive but I'm betting its not. I would go to the computer store with the drive and ask for an equivalent. Doesn't matter that what you purchase is a larger capacity drive. More than likely it will be. You should install the new drive along with the OS. If you don't have an emergency recovery disk or an OS, forget what I've said. You're not prepared to replace this drive and get your system booted.

The whole idea here is to get your system on it's feet - not sprinting but on it's feet. I would install the original drive confgured as a second drive. Say a prayer and when you boot your system, see if it can see your old drive. If it does spin up to ready condition, there is a chance that you can see your data and copy it onto the new drive. If it doesn't recognize the old drive, than it's time for a professional to determine if the only way to recover the data would be to send it to a special lab for data recovery. That is usually out of the possiblity for most people to afford. I've seen data lost by many a business over the years and have never seen any of them pay the high dollar for data recovery off of a crashed disk platter. That stuff is for the CIA & FBI. I would guess that it might start at a few thousand dollars.

Future - forget adding tape in todays world for backup. either purchase extra hard drives and copy important data to it religiously. only use that drive for data backup and not for anything else. when you get right down to it, most vital data to a persons career, livelyhood, etc is not all that much and will fit on a DVD or a few DVDs. I would keep life and death data backed up on DVDs and a second drive & on paper in a safe deposit box.

That's my two cents.

[Chris Soucy]

What's your system status? Not the one you're on - line with but the crashed one (obviously!).

Chris

[Tatsuya Graham]

well, i gave up...after a couple times of tapping the harddrive to get the rods in the harddrive to unjam, i gave up and chunked it out....no good anymore...I am just going to buy one of these..

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...m=250111021547

and next time, I am going to backup all of my files with dvds....


Thnx for all your help though...

[Dean Sensui]

General advice:

Always, always, ALWAYS have a backup.

If people knew how fine the tolerances are required to read and write data off ANY medium, they'd become paranoid enough to make at least two copies of anything important.

And with inexpensive fast drives, along with fast networks, there's little reason to not do this.

Fire extiguishers. Parachutes. Life preserers. Backups. Better to have 'em and not need 'em than need 'em and not have 'em.

[Jarrod King]

If you still have the drive this is worth a shot-

http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/thread9069.html

It seems freezing the drive does sometimes work long enough to get the data off of there.