nah the hdd's dead as a doornail. Oh well there will be a new one in by Tuesday I guess and I can spend a day installing windows and applications.

Don't feel too bad, pH. Hartmut had all the new Scienta's data on a Fujitsu drive (on the Scienta control computer). You can imagine the pain when he found it had crashed taking all his trophy spectra with it. :shrug: At least you had some backups.

talcum
you have any 'policy' re backups ? and the method ?

Just looked at it, last ghost image is from March :eek: better get on it this weekend.

Here's an unusual tip that worked for a colleague of mine here: seal the drive, then freeze it. Once frozen, re-connect it, and see if you can extract any data. It's very unusual, I know, but it worked for that colleague.

Is it dead/dead, as in no longer spinning?

bad idea, if you do not dehydrate it what happens to the moisture ?

Ben I've heard of that before but it's usually a solution for drives that are close to dead and clicking. This one doesnt detect in the bios or when it's put in a USB 2.0 enclosure. It's dead as **** basically.

If there's a silver lining it's that I missed the deadline (today) for some paperwork for a graduate class I was supposed to teach. So the hdd crash actually means LESS work for me in the next 4 months paradoxically

that doecs not sound really good re tenure ??

I have heard of this working also

worst case scenario, it fries the electronics of a dead drive

however if not detected in the BIOS, couldn't you get a controller board from ebay and solder it on?

I could but then I've bought the drive. Better to just return and RMA and move on.

Bill: Nah no worries there. I am teaching the same course to several of my students in New Zealand in Jan/Feb 2005 anyway (it's a tough life) and all I am required to be is an "acceptable" instructor anyway. Grant money and publications and graduate students are what make academic life go round...

Hmmm - I think that for general PC use that I prefer RAID-1, unless you have a serious industry-spec RAID-5 card.

Also, for really important data, set up a cheapie box (cheap CPU wise), stick a RAID-1 card and disks on it, and sit it in a different building and backup all important data to it at least every week on a Monday morning "routine" over the network.

Perhaps somewhat surprisingly doing that is probably safer than various company implementations which keep backups in the same building as their RAID-5 box.

For me - rotational storage is now cheap enough per GB to overlook CD's, DVD's and tapes, for anyone who cares.

Getting smarter, and one could setup a pair of Linux boxes. One as the primary server, and one as the back-up machine in a different building. Run a periodical job every day that creates a day-stamped directory on the back-up box, and the main fileserver copies all files (and directories) that have changed in the last day into that directory.

Then it's a simple matter to write a script that can extract any file from any date, or rebuild the filesystem state to a particular date, or simply just rebuild up until the present date.