"A Disk Error Occured Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to Restart"

[Shmee150]

I dropped it off with the company just now. Turned out that the needle had started destroying the disk, very odd for a computer that sits perfectly still all the time.

Needless to say there will be missing data but a vast chunk should be recoverable. Always good to know, well not good, but that I would only have done more damage by continuing and I've done the right thing if I wanted any data back from it. Just hurts horribly how much it's gonna cost me, and also that my birthday is this weekend and I'm now going to be without my computer on my bday - what's up with that! Ahh well I'll survive.

Cheers for the help anyway though guys.

[peterb]

I dropped it off with the company just now. Turned out that the needle had started destroying the disk, very odd for a computer that sits perfectly still all the time.

Needless to say there will be missing data but a vast chunk should be recoverable. Always good to know, well not good, but that I would only have done more damage by continuing and I've done the right thing if I wanted any data back from it. Just hurts horribly how much it's gonna cost me, and also that my birthday is this weekend and I'm now going to be without my computer on my bday - what's up with that! Ahh well I'll survive.

Cheers for the help anyway though guys.

Disk drives have a finite life - it is a question of when they will fail, not if! (SMART monitoring might have detected imminent failure) Still, good that you didn't continue, and may your data loss be minimal.

[Shmee150]

It's still surprising, it's only 18 months old I think. It's a 150gig WD Raptor bought when they were brand new. What do you recommend in the future then? Obviously from now on I am going to do regular backups of everything important; My Docs, My Pics, My Music de blah, but what kind of monitoring could I do on my computer to detect a problem like this?

A guy in my office joked that I must have got up and done something to it in my sleep, it did die overnight after all, remotely possible I suppose lol.

[Fraz]

Raid 1 or a Raid 5 setup isn't really that expensive these days, what with 400 GB disks being ~£50.

If you want to be really sure you're not going to lose stuff, I say back it up regularly on an external drive that is used for nothing other than that purpose, and periodically back really important stuff onto DVD and post it to your parents/store at work/etc. That way, even if your house burns down, you're not totally boned. And burning a DVD every 6 months or so isn't too much hassle at the end of the day.

[Shmee150]

it is when your my pictures folder is about 70 gigs!

But yeah I've now bought a 500 gig external to use purely for backing up.

[Shmee150]

Status update for anybody who's interested.

900 of the 300,000,000 sectors on the disk are dead. He reckoned that meant 90-95% of the files would be recoverable in full, and I will be sent a complete file listing later on today. I'm very scared that the number of sectors is significant due to the way file systems allocate and I'll lose vastly more files than this, I've just got to hope that out of the whole drive's 150gigs, most of the dead sectors cover files that aren't so important.

However, is anybody able to explain this sector business to me more clearly?

Thanks,

Tim

[Fraz]

http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_d...structures.htm

[peterb]

If the files are contiguous (that is in consecutive sectors) and the 900 lost secors are contiguous, then you have lost 450Kbytes of data minimum. If the lost sectors are scattered about the disk, or files, then you could have potentially lost 900 files - less of a problem if they are text (as some data may be recoverable with 'holes' where the text is missing, but more serious for image or audio files. Probably little point speculating - keep fingers crossed and wait for the file list.

(in the above figures I am assuming that the recovery process can still be executed with a lost/damaged File allocation or partitition table - which should be the case)

[Shmee150]

Thank you for your explanation, that was very helpful.

I'm hoping for the best at the moment, haven't received the e-mail. I'm going to try and forget about it over this weekend as I've got a lot going on, and hopefully on Monday (which is my Bday) I'll get some good news!

Only time will tell I suppose

Tim

[tekhead]

It could be best birthday present ever if you get 95% of your data back i have been in this position before, i backup most my files once a week on two seperate external drives (just incase one fails)

hopefully it will all work out for you in the end

[Shmee150]

More news.

Apparantly the mapping system has been hit as well. The guy said that the drive had been damaged in 2 seperate places, unfortunately the important places. This probably means it's going to be less good than I have been hoping. He did think I'd get the drive back by the end of the day though so now I'm going to have the most nerve racking day I could ever imagine worrying about how much he'll get Even though my worrying won't change anything.

[peterb]

Fingers remain crossed for you!

[Fraz]

Good luck!

[Lucio]

Hope this all works out for you!

Makes me glad that all my important files fit on a couple of DVD's.

Out of curiousity though, how do solid state drives rate in the reliability stakes? Are they more or less reliable?

[peterb]

Hope this all works out for you!

Makes me glad that all my important files fit on a couple of DVD's.

Out of curiousity though, how do solid state drives rate in the reliability stakes? Are they more or less reliable?

Not sure - FLASH ram has a finite number of write cycles before performance starts degrading. The most reliable was probably bubble memory, but I don't think anyone makes it anymore, and it only ever made it to specialist applications (military or aircraft because it was rugged.

A google search turned up this (among many others) http://www.storagesearch.com/siliconsys-art1.html

[tekhead]

DOH !!

If the mapping has gone it isnt great news, be a miracle if you still get 95% back, but keep hoping and praying