Thought I would share this with you guys.

Early last week, I decided to combine a couple of my server computers (one for file/web, other for htpc) into a single box and in the meantime, migrate to Windows Home Server and install a bigger drive (1.5TB).

So, I start deconstructing everything to shuffle parts around to make one 'good' (by good, I mean an Athlon 2800 system) computer. I take out the main data drive from the server and put it aside.

Things are going fairly well, so I get to the point of copying some data from the server drive back into the new server. I connect it via USB adapter to my main gaming pc to copy it over the network. Sit down, and it doesn't detect the drive. Start to open up 'Computer Manager' to find the problem, when I smell a burning electrical smell.

I unplug the drive and it is very warm, and has that 'smell of death' to it.

I leave it for a while and try again on a different system, with no luck. Listening to it, the drive doesn't even spin up, and the circuit board gets very hot.

Now, I have had to recover data from 'dead' drives many times and usually I am able to do it, but what do you when it won't spin up.

So, I start thinking about what I will lose of the drive. I backup my wife and my personal folder as well as our 'photos' folder every night, so I have those on an external USB HD. I will lose all of my game downloads and some other assorted things, not irreplacable, more of a pain in the ass.

So, I go to the external drive, connect it, yup, there's my backup files, one .bkf (NTBackup) for data, one for photos. Go to open them up, "There is unrecognized data in the backup set", on both files. They won't open.

This is where the 'high pucker factor' comes in. I panicked and had to leave the house for some fresh air for a while.

The last time I burned a DVD for offsite storage of our photos was probably almost a year ago, so we would lose that many photos of our two kids.

I.
AM.
DEAD.
MEAT.

Anyway to shorten this story, which is already too long, I read around and found some people have luck in swapping out the circuit board on the hard drive.

I checked at work and we didn't have a match. Checked on Ebay, no match, but there was a company (in Canada even, yay), that said they had other stock.

I contacted them, and for $40 (shipped) they could send me the board. My only other alternative was to buy a BKF recovery utilty for $89, but that wouldn't get back all my data likely.

So, I ordered the board last Friday, it arrived at work yesterday. Quick install, connect to my laptop, and IT'S ALIVE... ALIVE...

I actually got all of my data back off the disk. I couldn't believe it.

Just thought I would share as I was pretty sure I was screwed.

Cheers!

p.s. The reason for the failure (or my best guess) is likely a static build-up that caused the spindle to temporarily sieze, and when I plugged it in, the circuitry fried trying to get it to spin. There was some slight discolouration on the contact points of the circuit board to the HD.

Glad to hear you recovered the data Mojo.

Something the digital photo age has taken from many... PRINTS! Buy some nice prints, like the old days of photography. Nothing beats them IMO, and they'll be easy to look at decades down the road no matter where technology goes.

We actually do have quite a few prints. My wife researched around, and got samples from several places. We ended up using Shutterfly, and are pretty happy with the quality, and the price (if you pre-buy a bunch).

But, there are still quite a few shots that would have been lost, not to mention the last few months of photos that hadn't been developed.

It makes me wonder how many people have lost irreplaceable photos due to data loss. Part of setting up the Windows Home Server is that I am going to set it up along with MS Mesh to setup my sister and parents to backup their photos over the Internet to my server, as I know they are negligent in doing regular backups.

You know, none of this mattered before we had kids, go figure.

Interesting story, glad you will stay among the living.

The simple moral of the story is that if you do a backup (like your .BKF jobs) you have to verify the files. It's a very common error even for corporate IT Admins to create a backup job, leave it running for months, then to find out it didn't actually work as intended.

No kidding,

It is one of those things 'the Cobbler's kids have no shoes'.

At work, I make sure we do regular tests of our backup media, and run periodic restores of our monthly tapes.

I think what likely caused the bkf corruption was running out of space on the external drive, forgot to mention that before.

I Live to fight another day...

Great story. I've seen so many HD go south without any warning. I have all my images on Zenfolio and MS has their free 25Gb storage on Skydrive so thank goodness for cloud storage.

BTW, thanks for bringing this up, it reminded me to verify a few things about handling of .VHD full image backups which I use for my private system. I just switched over from Acronis and testing the reliability of that backup is paramount before I feel "safe".

It's really a good lesson to all our dear readers here in the hardware section.

Thanks for posting this. It gives me one more thing to try when I get a similar problem. I probably would not have thought of it on my own.

I use Amazon S3 now, and I tells ya, the $7 a month or whatever I'm paying for almost 100Gb (at last count, I think) of get-it-anywhere massively encrypted cloud storage is a price I'm more than willing to pay for zero data loss concern.

I'm currently archiving all my digital images and music, documents, etc. - automated incremental backups on a schedule of my choosing that doesn't interfere with other network use.

As I have a client* installed on all my home and work computers it also means I've not used a USB drive in over a year, so no danger of losing that either.

Definitely recommended!

Cheers, Spinner


* I use JungleDisk as my S3 client; I got in when it was $20 for life but I see now they've been bought out by Rackspace it's a subscription service. Macs, Windows, Linux, whatever, it's a seamless integration.

Good story - and a good lesson to all of us. I cringe every time I think of a hard drive crashing. I now have a 1.5 TB secondary internal drive that I back up things from my primary Raptor drive to. And every few weeks now I plug in a third external Seagate 1.5 TB portable drive which I archive things to.