[s-cars] NAC: hard drive crash

[Varon H. Fugman]

The IBM Deskstar series of hard drives are notoriously unreliable.  In, fact
there was a class action lawsuit about them (everybody gets a $5 gift
certificate from IBM, lawyers get $50 million in fees ;->.)  IBM is out of
the hardrive business now--I think they sold the operation to Hitachi.

I had a 40GB IBM drive fail a few months ago... I was able to install it as
a second drive in another machine, and get an image of the drive... I
recovered 95% of the drive, everything I cared about.

I used a program called GetDataBack to image the drive and recover the
files.  Costs about $70, but the free eval version will let you image your
drive and show you what files it can recover.  (And the first thing you
should do if your bad drive connects at all is make an image onto a good
drive; then recover files from the image.)

Varon
'95 urS6 with 30GB iPod

P.S. For everybody out there that *isn't* doing backups, get a plan in
place!  As prices come down and sizes go up, hard drive quality is going
down.  Manufacturers have dropped hard driver warranties from 5 years to 3
years to 1 year.  Always be prepared for a crash.  Getting an external USB
hard drive (160GB or bigger) and just copying everything to it is one way to
go.

P.P.S. One other harddrive recovery trick, which I've never used myself, is
to put it in the freezer for a few hours.  Then connect it to the computer
and see if it will work.  If the problem is mechanical, cooling it down may
allow it to work again long enough to copy your data off it.