My hard disk died

I have never had a hard drive die on me, but I have had to help others replace theirs and I have saved someone else's information just before their drive died. I have purchased used hard drives for builds that I have sold and never received any complaints. I usually sell my equipment when I upgrade, but I have some hard drives that I have owned for a while and still no problems with them. I have even fixed a hard drive damaged by a power surges. That drive will still hold data, but you can't load an operating system from it. The boot sectors were completely damaged. What make and model hard drive was the one that died on you?

Hi Bionicman.

Sorry to here that man. The same thing happened to me a few years back and a hard drive fry on me and I lost all my photos and documents that I had stored and the worst thing is as you say they can't be replaced. I was always saying I will back it up tomorrow, then tomorrow would come and I would still put it off and then disater struck the drive died.

I have learned my lesson form it and always back up to CD or DVD now when I have some important files.

Oh yes. This has happened to me and i was so angry i wanted to throw the whole computer out the window, or bust it apart with a hammer. It is so annoying when this happens. I lost alot of family photos that luckily other members had copies of and i was able to get some of them back.

Hard disk?oh that's too bad,did you try to take to some professional computer expert and ask them to recover your disk? this way you may get a part of things back,one of my colleague's computer have the same problem with you,she changed a new disk,and our IT specialist helped to recovered some of the data from the dead disk,you could have a try

I feel sorry for you. It happened to me too just recently. Though it's not as high as 120gb. Only 40gb but still it has all the files i'm preserving so much. I lost all my 20gb of metal music i earned for years way back when i was still using a dial up. The worst part, i lost all the photos of me and my former girlfriend. I never had the chance to back things up though i was planning to burn them on dvd but it was too late. I don't know what went wrong but i think it's this stupid cpu with weak power supply.

Hi there Bionicman, I've had hard disks rendered inoperable quite a few times, and I had to replace them with new hard disks and reinstall everything. Usually there are warning signs before hard disks crash, like clicking noises heard for days and weeks before they actually die. In such situations, it is best to back up all your essential data before failure takes place, then get a new hard disk and reinstall your system, and don't use that hard disk anymore.

I'm sorry about what has happened to you. But don't give up just yet....there may be a chance you may still get back something. Don't throw the defective hard disk away...yet. Try attaching it to a PC or notebook as an external slave drive and see if it reads at all. If it still reads intermittently, copy out whatever you can copy to a good working hard disk. You can try for days, and sometimes you may just get lucky if on one or two occasions, the hard disk reads. If the critical files are images, you can try using software for image recovery to see if you can still recover your images. Two software I have used before are Recover My Files and Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery. They can be downloaded free (at least the trial ones are). Just google for them. There are many other such software you can find around. In the worst case scenario, if you hard disk totally cannot be accessed, there is still hope. There are shops out there which can do professional data recovery for you even if it seems like a hopeless situation, but it will cost you quite a bit of money for such services. Most people won't pay for it and will only do so if the files are really critical and have to be recovered, eg. important company or project files where no backup or earlier copies are available.

Hope the above information I've shared helps you in some way.

Victor

Ouch. Just... ouch.

Well if it makes you feel any better, I'm so sorry your hard disk conked out on you for good, and may it rest in peace.

None of my hard drives are dead yet, and the earliest one I got is an 80GB drive that's already alive. If it wasn't for the loss of my files through my years of computer usage I wouldn't have learned how to back up my files. All it takes to learn the lesson the hard way is to lose something you take for granted that you've never thought about backing up. I got multiple external hard disk drives; one for the original, and one for backup just in case one goes so that I can save my money to buy another drive to store my files in. I also got files that can't be replaced, and as a technophile, i'm doing my best to keep them with me for a long time.

my hard disk is functioning something wrong..sometimes if function well..sometimes it is not good..but most of the time it will always brings defect and good we have a technician who could do alternatives on it..anyway i am saving back -up over online thru my email..what's the worst thing that ever happen is that i forgot my password i couldn't still remember it until now.

It happened a year ago, but I have nothing to worry about cause it had been used for 7 yrs. It's old and useless.
Sorry about your bad luck.
Hope everything will be fine soon.
Good luck this time.

Yes,it happened to me just recently. But my story was this, my computer was on Linux system this is at the office. Our bosses change the system back to Windows, they reformat my hard disk, all of my pictures were saved on the desktop of Linux, so when it was reformat it was deleted. They cannot retrieve the picture. I want to kill my boss honestly because graduation pictures of my younger brother is included on the pictures that were not retrieved. At the moment I found out about it, I became weak and I cried. My problem now is how to say the bad news to my brother.