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Hard Drive Failiure

7th of Sep, 2006ce* in: blog

Today, waking up on my sofa realising I left my computer on all night, I noticed that my trusty backup USB drive wasn’t working. This drive has been with me through thick and thin for about 3 years, I’ve taken to Japan 4 times!

Also this drive holds my entire working life. And now it seems, all my work has gone.

The list of things on there is too great to detail, but I recently migrated all the movies etc off it to another drive, leaving it purely for work. I even had some documents open when it died. It houses all of my reference material, every scrap of illustration I’ve ever done and all of my work from the past 8 years.

Thankfully I migrated all my email, personal photos and music to my mac from the drive. At least I can get all my important documents from my mail, which is handy (when you’re taking someone to court!). But as for the rest of my digital life, I can just wave goodbye.

I still need to try some other software (disk warrior) on the drive, but it costs $80. My mac tells me it’s a FAT error (which would imply that the file table has become corrupt). Recently I’ve been guessing that the drive was getting de-fragged by the mac when it’s idle because of the data clicking away. Also the mac was set to turn the external drives off (I have two) automatically when they are redundant.

Needless to say, this is a big shit.

If I get the drive up and running again, I will burn a few DVD’s of my most important stuff - for example: my clients!

Luckily, I’m not in the middle of anything major right now. I was working on notion designs re-newal but it was only a template and I have the base image in my email.

fuck fuck fuck :/

It hasn’t really sunk in yet. If I can’t repair it or if the drive is corrupted nonsense, I will have lost years of work, image reference and documents.

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noise (6)

snow, Thursday, September 7, 2006, 21:06

oh, dear…

Edmund, Friday, September 8, 2006, 8:21

doh!

hawken, Friday, September 8, 2006, 16:33

ah bugger, I just tried to run it through “Disk Warrior” but the software doesn’t support my type of error.

cries

Russ, Saturday, September 9, 2006, 16:40

Was the drive formatted for Mac? Most USB drives come pre-formatted as (DOS) FAT, and I believe OS X supports that natively - if it was, you could try repairing it on a PC instead (ScanDisk)…

There are companies, such as OnTrack (.com) who specialise in data recovery - even from physically dead drives (head crash, burnt-out circuitry, etc.) - but they’re bloody expensive.

Trace, Monday, September 11, 2006, 8:50

Oh crap! How frustrating. Hope you manage to sort it ok.

hawken, Monday, September 11, 2006, 13:47

Well, a small update here. I ran the drive through some software on Windows (I have dual boot on my mac) and it could read all the data, however, and heres the crafty part; it costs $60 to unlock the software to save the files! I did a bit of searching around, this is pretty much the cheapest software on the market (and there are no cracks!) so I will end up buying it.

>Russ
Nothing on the mac worked because the operating system can’t fix drives unless they have been formatted for the mac. ScanDisk wasn’t going to work either because the drive comes up as “unformatted” in windows.

Boo! I hate computers! パソコンきらい！