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Anyone taken a hard drive apart?

Preferred User

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Cman I hope you're kidding and not getting defensive. I did think you were probably right....and it turns out you probably were. When you hear a tickiing noise in a hard drive and can feel the vibe with your fingers, that tells a tale.

You don't get a lot of detail back from the clean room, to the account rep, then to me. At some point there are moving parts in a computer...and you can never trust those. That's what bit this client. Well, that and the fact that she doesn't back up.
 
H

hoppi

ask NSA or CIA to help her out.
yeah...just kidding...but these guys would be the only ones left who could save her whole "life" on that HD.seriously.


but why is a hd "toasted" when you open it?i really can't follow you. :eyebulge:
 

mindido

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hoppi,

In a nutshell, HD's are assembled in a clean room where no dust and static are allowed. Thats impossible to achieve in a regular room. The introduction of those two things (and probably more that I'm not aware of) severely limit the capabilities of any HD to work.
 

Cman

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hoppi said:
but why is a hd "toasted" when you open it?i really can't follow you. :eyebulge:
its just because its really sensitive equipment. i can't think of a good analogy, but imagine trying to develop film in a regular room instead of a dark room. the film would get messed up right?

the plates in a hard drive are kind of like a CD, in the sense that dirt and scratches will make them not work right. only multiply the sensitivity by a million (because you can throw CDs around and they will still work)
 

LIKETOLOOK

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Also the things a hard drive looks at are microscopic in size. A piece of dust is huge to a machine as sensitive as a hard drive. Plus staic can burn circuits and cause dust to cling.
I keep everything I will restore onto my computer when I make a clean format in one file for easy back up. Then I scan that file for spware, scan it for trojans, scan it for viruses all in safe mode. And then back it up to an external hd. Takes about 2hrs with scan and write time.
Very soon I will mirror the back ups periodically and leave one HD in a safe box. Important if you,ve got family pics you can never replace. Or other ireplaceable Docs.
 

Cman

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I just have 2 HDs, one for data, one for the OS. Makes formatting easy ;)

They can be physical or logical, either way it works.
 

LIKETOLOOK

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I have a raid. How would I set that up for next time when I format? Do you mean raid when you say logical? If you don't mind me asking.
 

mindido

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LIKETOLOOK said:
I have a raid. How would I set that up for next time when I format? Do you mean raid when you say logical? If you don't mind me asking.

First off, RAID does not equal logical. RAID is basically a method of arranging HD's while logical refers to a partitioned drive.

I do about the same thing as CMAN but slightly different. I also have two HD's (a 40 GB and an 80 GB) which are each partitioned at least twice (C:\ (20 GB), D:\ (20 GB), E:\ (40 GB) and F:\ (40 GB)). The OS and all apps are installed to the C:\ drive and all files that I create or download are placed on the D, E, or F drives. All backups are to an external HD or online.

The advantage of this is that, if you place all of your files on a separate drive, a simple click and drag is all thats required to back up your files. Once you get used to it, its REALLY simple.

When I need to format, and I do that about twice a year, I only have to format the C drive and not worry about losing data on the other drives.

Hope that answers your question.
 

LIKETOLOOK

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That does answer my question thanks. And you get all the benefits of a regular format? I've got 2 200 gig drives so it takes forever to fomat. I do know how to set partitions.
 

Cman

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Yes, just make your C:\ drive like 10 gigs or something and then you only have to format the 10 instead of the whole 200.

ONLY put your OS on the C: drive (whatever it normally installs during a fresh install). Install your Program Files on the C: too. You will still have to reinstall your programs every time because they put stuff in the registry and through the system.

But you won't have to worry about all your music, pics, videos and other docs like that. You can even repoint your My Documents folder to one of the other drives if you want.

RAID is kind of a hard thing to explain. Its mainly used for redundancy, so you don't lose important info. In the past its mostly been used in the business world for sensitive information, but I guess its starting to trickle down to the home world as well. If you're just dealing with "home" type stuff, I wouldn't really be concerned about even having it set up at all.
 
C

Cobra

Consider making a partition just for temp files or swap files. 5-10gb and point all your temporary operations. This will help your drives from becoming to fragmented. Things like:

ripping CDs creates temporary .wav files before encoding
photoshop uses a huge temp
windows swap
etc.
 

mindido

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LIKETOLOOK said:
And you get all the benefits of a regular format? I've got 2 200 gig drives so it takes forever to fomat.

Yes, there are no differences in the results of a format. It basically just makes it really easy to back everything up since you always know where your files are and the files and apps are kept separate.

In your case, with two 200 GB HDs, your partitioning would be different than mine. Depending on the apps you use, you'd probably want to partition the C:\ for at least 20 to 30 MB with the rest for files. For the second drive, depending on if you use any other OS's (Linux or something) you may want to set a small partition for the swap file (especially if your using Photoshop) and the rest for whatever you want.
 

GrapJ

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bump

i have a video from the inside
AND
i have a maxtor HD and used it (opened) to store and restore data on.
it's fun : you get a succesful copy-action 1 out of ten times.
With every action the HD is doing it is degrading rapidly.

my RAID story
Installed a raid card and connected my (not-backupped) Cdisk to it.
The installer/raidcard asked me if i wanted this disk to be a startup-disk, so i answered yes.
At that moment the bootsector of the disk was altered 1028 bytes.
All data on the disk was lost. (this means : also all partition information and mirroroffset-data)
Those 1028 bytes contain your disks (Boot,data,partition,mirror) startpoints.(offset) Without this index it is impossible (even for the manufacturer) to recover data from it. In this case a ghostcopy is made and searched for ascii characters. However, compressed data, like pics, video and zip files, are almost impossible to retrieve if this happens.
And yes, the FBI, CIA and every other governemental company will help you by sending you to a known repaircompany.
They will not help you theirselves.
In case of this thread : if a HD is losing its integrity or has been opened and you really want the data or parts of it recovered then contact the manufacturer; I have seen this solution in several threads now.
 

rabbit

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Lost files

After reading these threads I feel like some of the repliers might have a suggestion for me. I have an external hard drive and one of the file folders on the external hard rive is now missing files. I used it one day and the next day the files were missing. Does anyone have any suggestions to recover files that "might" be hidden? I have tried the properties function to see hidden files but not luck.
 

mindido

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rabbit,

I can't say for sure, but the first thing I would do is run Spybot S&D, AdAware and MalwareBytes on it to check for malware.

A couple months ago I was working on a clients machine and made the mistake of backing up all of his files to my external HD. I then made an additional mistake of double clicking on some of them to check if they were still needed. As the hour was late, I shut the HD and computer down and retired. The next morning I started both up and found the HD was trashed and only visible in Computer Management. I wound up actually having to purchase software that would recover some of my most valuable data.

Try that first and let us know.
 

rabbit

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Thanks mindido, for the advice. Ironically, when I scanned the particular file folder with Norton and Ad-Aware/Spybot, Norton still says the files are there as I can see it scanning them. However, when I double click and open the file folder, I cannot see any of the files the virus scanner is reading. Any ideas?
 

UltraLisk

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hmmm, old thread but interesting info. Funnoy how people dont backup critial things. I sort of have cman setup, but I also backup the most critial data to another HDD (every 2 months) and even re-backup that data to a DVD (twice a year)...

So in theory two HDDs would have to fail for me to go back to using my DVD which at worse would be 6 months old.

anyway, rabbit:

If you notice a folder missing it might be possible that you accidentally deleted it. If that is the case stop using that HDD and get a tool that can scan for that type of thing.

Also Norton is bad, DO NOT use Norton. Norton is for suckers.
 

mindido

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rabbit,

So, you can see the folder the files are in, but you can't see the files in the folder? Is that correct? Also, when you ran Spybot and AdAware, what did they find? Nothing?

The only thing I can think of is that somehow the file attributes may have been changed to hidden. I'm not sure how that would have happened if you didn't do it but....

I'd check the attributes of the folder. See if that does anything. But it sounds a bit far fetched.
 

Pemolis

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Program Called PC Inspector. Its free and helps with file recovery. Other than that, 2 options.

1) Sometimes a plain old checkdisk will help recover files *you'd be surprised*

2) Take the HD out, put it into another computer that has an installation, and see if you can drag/drop all the files off that drive to the new one. If it is completely fried... you'll need some professional tools, or just have to find and download everything again.
 
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