FabSwingers.com > Forums > The Lounge > Any computer experts out there?
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"Hiya Can you tell me the model and make of portable hard drive ?? Data reco0very is fairly straight forward so heppy to help Need to know is it self powered ( IE do you need to plug it in or does it just run of USB ) There are a few options so let me know the above and will advise you " Thanks for such a prompt response. Its a 1TB Western Digital external USB type thingy. Its no longer recognised by my laptop. A friend of mine took a brief look and said that the drive appears to be "Raw"? | |||
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"home insurance will probably cover it and the guy fixing it wont see you .. or at least that in the flesh" Thats sounds an interesting avenue to pursue - thank you for that. Mwah!! | |||
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"Hiya Can you tell me the model and make of portable hard drive ?? Data reco0very is fairly straight forward so heppy to help Need to know is it self powered ( IE do you need to plug it in or does it just run of USB ) There are a few options so let me know the above and will advise you Thanks for such a prompt response. Its a 1TB Western Digital external USB type thingy. Its no longer recognised by my laptop. A friend of mine took a brief look and said that the drive appears to be "Raw"? " Hiya and no probs for reply If its appearing as RAW that is the state all hard drives first come in ( no file system or format etc ) that could be tricky but there are ways around it Alternatively it could be the caddy thats faulty ( the case that holds the physical hard drive ) in which case a new caddy could resolve it straight away ?? First thing is dont panic the data can be recovered although will take a little time and effort lol !! Funnily enough we notice your in bristol as well and wondered which part as we are too ? I ( Jamie ) can fix this for you if its important to recover the data, but obviously would need to either be there or you come to us as may need specific software etc ?? Entirely up to you ?? And feel free to inbox us and ill be happy to help x | |||
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"As usual lot of half truths and nonsense talked in these threads. I'm in IT and have a mate runs a data recovery company that other data recovery companies go to, as well as a host of top FTSE companies. This is the straight skinny. 1/ These external drives are either 2.5" laptop style hard disks or 3.5" desktop style hard disk, stuck onto a custom PCB, and stuck in a cheap and nasty case with usually USB but sometimes 1394 or eSATA connectors. 2/ Being external, small and portable, they get a lot of abuse, I get one of these jobs in a week on average. a/ punter leaves the cables in, and as a result the usb socket or PCB is broken, solution is to buy a new unit and copy the data across. b/ punter pulls the plug during a write cycle or other operation, or suffers other form of data loss, disk can be seen and many files can be seen, in this case software recovery options such as Kroll for home users or R-studio for the pros can be used to recover data, usually with a good success rate. c/ disk is showing as raw or unformatted, it has physical damage, either sector damage due to a head crash (disk being moved while read/write in progress) or on bard control PCB is dead / dying, absolutely the worst thing you can do is put power on the drive and then attempt a software recovery or let windows try to find and fix bad sectors, it just does more damage... the repair is to get an IDENTICAL make model and firmware hd and swap the heads and drive pcb over and hope for the best (if the spindle motor or bearing are gone then another order or magnitude added to the difficulty and cost) which is why data recovery costs a lot of money and comes with no guarantees. Doing B to a disk that needs C makes C ten times harder and more expensive. Expect to pay 3/400 quid to get C done, with no guarantees, I know of cases where the DR company managed to get all the films and mp3's back, which were replaceable, but none of the family snaps or videos, which weren't. An external disk, as you have discovered, is not a backup, it is a copy. With the exceptions of some corporate HD's, you will never see a PC or HD that is not full of porn, usually home made porn, and other private data... provided this porn etc is not illegal, they don't give a shit, any more than Kodak used to give a shit about developing home made stills and cine that was porn. So, to sum up.. Sounds like you have already done the wrong thing, and put power to the drive and tried to see what was wrong, so you have made the damage worse. Your mate says the drive is RAW, if you are *extremely* lucky this *might* mean the hardware is fine and you just lost the partition tables etc, this can happen, in theory, but like I said I get one a week of these and I have never seen it yet... So your options are 1/ pay a reputable DR company 3/400 quid, provided there is nothing illegal on your drive 2/ say sayonara to it all and learn the lessons that an external disk is a copy, not a backup. I tend to advise customers not to look at the cost of the DR, but to look at the *real* cost of NOT having that data, if THAT cost is 3/4k then betting 10% of that on maybe getting it back is a good bet." Now that's an answer - thank you for your candid advice. You've given me much food for thought! Mwah!! | |||
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"Half truths and nonsense ?? Thats firstly a little strong and unapprecited since i was trying to help, secondly basically you have totally bamboozled the original OP with technical blurb when all she asked was some help with her hard drive. I have recovered data for friends and family many times from hard drives, it does take a little time but it is possible. As a pointer perhaps you should offer straight forward help and advise instead of masses of technical stuff which the OP wont understand, dont insult other posters and finally 3 to £400 is a ridiculously high amouont of money when it can be done for a much smaller amount by a professional company or even free by someone who knows what they are doing and willing to help a fellow fabber ! " Yes sunshine, half truths and nonsense. No names and no pack drill, but IT is my game, and when it comes to IT hardware in general, and hard disks and data recovery in particular, you could hardly have picked a worse person than me to compare dick sizes with... I have for many years designed and built hardware for one of the top DR companies. 1/ it wasn't "technical blurb", it was very approximate and very basic layman's speak... but at the end of the day it is a technology we are dealing with, and it does nobody any favours, least of all the end user, to start talking simplistic crap... how would you feel going to a neurosurgeon about your dad's stroke and he started talking about the thingummy went up to the ooojimaflip and sort of borked the whatchamacallit and that's why dad dribbles. 2/ So you have run a few software tools that are just a GUI wrapped around an undelete command line, big deal, if you knew anything about how hard disks write and store and delete data you'd know how elementary this is... since you don't, I will explain at the end, in layman's terms. 3/ 3/400 is the average cost to sort a TB external HD for DR, it is what it is, if you had clue #1 about the work and equipment involved you'd see it was actually pretty reasonable... lacking a fucking crystal ball, you have NO IDEA if it can, as you state, be done for a much smaller amount or for free... if you honestly believe you are that good, set up in DR now, I have a box full or HD's from british nuclear fuels, the beeb, and siemens, all of whom will gladly pay £3k per unit if you can get the data back. ========================= imagine a big room with a slot in the roof, full of shelves, and the shelves are full of blackboards / slates.. the room has a slot in the roof, through which pieces of paper drop. these pieces of paper are computer data,maybe the keystrokes used to type this, maybe a jpeg, maybe a letter to the bank. hard disks write data by an operator grabbing each piece of paper, wandering along the shelves until it find and "EMPTY" slate, and writing the data on that slate.. then back to the ***first shelf*** to record what was just written, and the place to find that slate, rack 17, shelf 4, box 3, slate 9 and this my "letter to bank.doc" Note the data is in once place, the INDEX to show where the data is is somewhere else. When you delete "letter to bank.doc" the opeator just goes to the first shelf and alters the slate there to say that rack 17, shelf 4, box 3, slate 9 no longer contains "letter to bank.doc".. even though it still does, it is marked as EMPTY and can be written on again. "letter to bank.doc" can be spread across many slates, it doesn't matter, as long as the index slates keep track. you can move all the slates around, copy / move / defragment, all you have to do is update the index slates. ----------------------------- The "data recovery" that you claim to be able to do, is merely going through all the slates and finding the ones that contain data, but do not have matching records in the index slate, this is just command line undelete. What happens when a drive gets borked or is showing as RAW is the operator above had died and there is a rotting corpse in the file room. What a DR company does is buy an IDENTICAL room with an IDENTICAL operator, and move all the slates across from the old room to the new room. This, my friend, is simplistic "laymans" language that is so simplistic the description itself tells more lies than truth. -------------------------- As stated above, I am in business in IT, I get a dead external drive every week, and a dead laptop twice a week, most of the time I turn the work down, because the user has been "advised" by experts such as yourself, with the result that I simply cannot do a professional standard of work, for the money they now think the job is worth. | |||
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"No help in this case, but we've set up *2* 1Tb hardrives to hold our essential data, in a RAID array. If one should fail, you can remove it, replace it, and the data will be copied over from the other. Obviously relying on the chances of 2 failing *at the same time* being quite small (they're actually 2 different makes, just for extra safety). This isn't a substitute for properly backing stuff up, which we do weekly, onto a pair of rotated 1Tb drives. But then our server is up 24/7." Nitpicking, but it depends on the RAID etc... RAID is not backup. MTBF drops the more drives you add. RAID-1 is some use, but sometimes the rebuild does not work, quite often in fact, DR companies do a lot of RAID work, even RAID-5 Your rotated external "backup" does not qualify as a backup until / unless you have successfully done bare metal recovery from them, which should be tested every month as a minimum. The rotated external drives also need to be stored in a separate physical location. | |||
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"As usual lot of half truths and nonsense talked in these threads. Western Digital drives are one of the best drives for reliability I have seen few of these drive failing compared to other drives. If you can see the drive skip to 3 1. Try the drive in another PC 2. New cable for the drive 3. Download photorec No need to sent the drive off to a data recovery company and no need to spend money on software, you will however need another drive to copy the files over to. If the heads have crashed then it's not worth the effort to recover photos 300/400 is a tenth of what they would charge to change the platters and realign the heads, never mind finding a similar drive with the correct firmware you have more chance of finding hens teeth." | |||
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"As usual lot of half truths and nonsense talked in these threads. Western Digital drives are one of the best drives for reliability I have seen few of these drive failing compared to other drives. If you can see the drive skip to 3 1. Try the drive in another PC 2. New cable for the drive 3. Download photorec No need to sent the drive off to a data recovery company and no need to spend money on software, you will however need another drive to copy the files over to. If the heads have crashed then it's not worth the effort to recover photos 300/400 is a tenth of what they would charge to change the platters and realign the heads, never mind finding a similar drive with the correct firmware you have more chance of finding hens teeth. " The OP is better going to the geek squad at pissy world and being told she needs a new GFX card than listening to you two... Ignorance is curable, stupidity isn't. | |||
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"As usual lot of half truths and nonsense talked in these threads. Western Digital drives are one of the best drives for reliability I have seen few of these drive failing compared to other drives. If you can see the drive skip to 3 1. Try the drive in another PC 2. New cable for the drive 3. Download photorec No need to sent the drive off to a data recovery company and no need to spend money on software, you will however need another drive to copy the files over to. If the heads have crashed then it's not worth the effort to recover photos 300/400 is a tenth of what they would charge to change the platters and realign the heads, never mind finding a similar drive with the correct firmware you have more chance of finding hens teeth. The OP is better going to the geek squad at pissy world and being told she needs a new GFX card than listening to you two... Ignorance is curable, stupidity isn't." What is wrong with you ?? Some people care and try to help others !! Stop insulting people and get a life mate ! | |||
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"Not more computer rows I shall stay quiet, but OP if you want to mail feel free." Whats a computer lol | |||
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"Not more computer rows I shall stay quiet, but OP if you want to mail feel free. Whats a computer lol " No idea | |||
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"Not more computer rows I shall stay quiet, but OP if you want to mail feel free. Whats a computer lol No idea " Its 1 of they things you use to perv free porn | |||
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"Not more computer rows I shall stay quiet, but OP if you want to mail feel free. Whats a computer lol No idea Its 1 of they things you use to perv free porn " What's porn? | |||
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"Not more computer rows I shall stay quiet, but OP if you want to mail feel free. Whats a computer lol No idea Its 1 of they things you use to perv free porn What's porn? " Whats perv ?? | |||
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"Not more computer rows I shall stay quiet, but OP if you want to mail feel free. Whats a computer lol No idea Its 1 of they things you use to perv free porn What's porn? Whats perv ?? " Oopps just me then | |||
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"Not more computer rows I shall stay quiet, but OP if you want to mail feel free. Whats a computer lol No idea Its 1 of they things you use to perv free porn What's porn? Whats perv ?? Oopps just me then " I can't even "turn" a pc on, get it | |||
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"Not more computer rows I shall stay quiet, but OP if you want to mail feel free. Whats a computer lol No idea Its 1 of they things you use to perv free porn What's porn? Whats perv ?? Oopps just me then I can't even "turn" a pc on, get it " Ha ha ha that made me chuckle lol | |||
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"Have to say this has been the best thread ive read this year ...nearly wettin myself laughing at the my disc drives bigger than yours lmao " | |||
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" Nitpicking, but it depends on the RAID etc... RAID is not backup. MTBF drops the more drives you add. RAID-1 is some use, but sometimes the rebuild does not work, quite often in fact, DR companies do a lot of RAID work, even RAID-5 Your rotated external "backup" does not qualify as a backup until / unless you have successfully done bare metal recovery from them, which should be tested every month as a minimum. The rotated external drives also need to be stored in a separate physical location." Did we say RAID was backup ? Actually we pointed out it *wasn't*. MTBF isn't really an issue, it's MTTR. RAID Rebuild has been tested 4 times in 18 months. Slow but perfect every time. Maybe because it's a software RAID under Linux ? The external backup isn't meant for a bare metal recovery. This is a home server, not a mission critical box. If the actual machine went paws-up we'd just pull a spare out of the loft, and plug the *data* drives in. Although if we really wanted too, we could image off the OS and reclone it to a new machine. Backup drive is held offsite, as an in-law runs his own company, and we keep his backups, so it's a weekly swap. | |||
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"Pmsl think I have seen it all now. Unlucky OP, bet you never imagined that response. Flop your cock on the counter Can't believe nobody suggested rubbing peanut butter into the caddy" Chunky or smooth? | |||
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"Pmsl think I have seen it all now. Unlucky OP, bet you never imagined that response. Flop your cock on the counter Can't believe nobody suggested rubbing peanut butter into the caddy" I did flop mine out but it CRASHED lmao | |||
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"Pmsl think I have seen it all now. Unlucky OP, bet you never imagined that response. Flop your cock on the counter Can't believe nobody suggested rubbing peanut butter into the caddy Chunky or smooth?" Has to be smooth. The chunks play havoc with a USB connection | |||
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"Pmsl think I have seen it all now. Unlucky OP, bet you never imagined that response. Flop your cock on the counter Can't believe nobody suggested rubbing peanut butter into the caddy I did flop mine out but it CRASHED lmao " That's because you were barged out of the way by a big cock | |||
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"Pmsl think I have seen it all now. Unlucky OP, bet you never imagined that response. Flop your cock on the counter Can't believe nobody suggested rubbing peanut butter into the caddy I did flop mine out but it CRASHED lmao That's because you were barged out of the way by a big cock " LMFAO | |||
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"Fuck it ... i`m going back to get my ZX 81 rock n rolling again" | |||
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"Fuck it ... i`m going back to get my ZX 81 rock n rolling again" I had one of them. How I miss the old way of 'downloading' when you recorded a broadcast on the radio to a tape cassette and then hooked it up to your ZX with a cable. Or the other, more infuriating, way of typing in line after line of machine code printed in a magazine only to find there was a misprint on line 325 when they print the misprints two weeks later. I miss those days. Not. | |||
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"Thanks for all the help my fellow Fabbers. I do appreciate it. After much serious consideration I think the best thing to do is to chuck the darn thing into an attic box and drink far too much later. Im going into town find buy a good bottle of wine and an old fashioned 35mm film camera xx" I have to say I've been admiring your firmware here. Can you start some more threads please. Many many more. Ta. | |||
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"Soooo.... this switch that says "On" I press that, right? Then what? " Look at the pretty shapes n things that come on the screen. After that, well, I usually close me eyes and press something. | |||
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" Look at the pretty shapes n things that come on the screen. After that, well, I usually close me eyes and press something." You trust the force to take you where you wanna go? | |||
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"No wonder IT bods get given a bad name is there? Why is it this profession is full of "I know more than you do"idiots. Always one up manship and boasting. you don't hear plumbers saying my u-bends bigger than yours. And I'm an IT consultant of 23 years! " | |||
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"No wonder IT bods get given a bad name is there? Why is it this profession is full of "I know more than you do"idiots. Always one up manship and boasting. you don't hear plumbers saying my u-bends bigger than yours. And I'm an IT consultant of 23 years! " Erm nope don't tar all I.T experts with the same brush just because of people on here! You will find any forum you may go on people are "experts". | |||
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"No wonder IT bods get given a bad name is there? Why is it this profession is full of "I know more than you do"idiots. Always one up manship and boasting. you don't hear plumbers saying my u-bends bigger than yours. And I'm an IT consultant of 23 years! hes one himself hun Erm nope don't tar all I.T experts with the same brush just because of people on here! You will find any forum you may go on people are "experts"." hes one himself hun;-) | |||
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"No wonder IT bods get given a bad name is there? Why is it this profession is full of "I know more than you do"idiots. Always one up manship and boasting. you don't hear plumbers saying my u-bends bigger than yours. And I'm an IT consultant of 23 years! hes one himself hun Erm nope don't tar all I.T experts with the same brush just because of people on here! You will find any forum you may go on people are "experts". hes one himself hun;-)" And? | |||
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