Hard drive failure taking your stuff away :(

[FOL]

Touch wood, I have never had a single piece of hardware fail pc wise (accept for a motherboard,that had a faulty AGP from new).
I still own the very first HDD I bought. It was 2.1GB and still works perfectly.
I then bought a 4.8GB, still have that and it works perfect. I then waited a few years and bought 750GB, which I have been using for the last 7 years, with out any issues what so ever.

CF cards / devices of that nature are a different story. Had loads of those fail.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by dirkies

Also, try GetDataBack recovery tool, very good (we here at work tried many and this was the only one to recover decent data), but takes a few days for large drives...

I gave this a try before reading your post. It was the ONLY software that showed up anything for the drive.
I now managed to recover my Amiga files!!!! I am super happy about this. I would recommend this software to anyone and for 80 dollars it's a great deal.

The software managed to find everything, but now I gotta just copy what's essential and get rid of the rest. There's a lot of TOSEC sets I don't care for and will let go. Hard drive crashes are good exercises in being zen and letting things go :P But I was really sad about my Amiga backups. Sad no more!

Now to make QUADRUPLE copies of this stuff...

[dirkies]

wow, this is great news Akira! And another proof GDB is really a kick ass recovery tool for Windows (I am not affiliated with the company selling this but here at work we tested over 20 of such tools all promising to do a good recovery, all but 1 failed miserably recovering useful data)

Beware to TEST your files, as sometimes it will find the same file several times during recovery, but only 1 will be the correct one, others will contain just garbled crap)

[Amiga1992]

Thanks for the tip! I will test the files. It did show more than one partition data so I hope I chose the right one. I opened a few textfiles like startup sequences and the content was OK so I am hoping the rest are fine too. I got no duplicates though.

Yes, I tested a lot of stuff, Windows tools, Linux based, and I really tried to sort out a live CD that included dd_rescue but failed, it isn't easy (I wish someone would make such an image).

The Runtime Live CD worked great and it's free so you can see if it actually works. I left it there overnight and in the morning all my files were shown on the directory tree. I made the decision right then

I am guessing the hard drive is somewhat OK, but I don't trust it. After I am done recovering these files I will format it and see what's up. I have absolutely no idea what the hell happened here, but if GetBack is recovering files, I am assuming the drive's logic is OK. I tested the drive on my own USB enclosure and the same happened so the problem isn't within the Western Digital enclosure.

[dirkies]

I did once recover for someone off a 750GB drive that was simply not formattable anymore, it was just "you need to format before use" all the time but format failed each time.
GDB did recover their 30GB of personal pics and holiday movies, phew. But it scanned the drive for over 2 days (deep scan), and initially it saved about 300GB of "suspected files" of which only 30GB turned out to be the good ones (the filenames were gone, so you had to go through each of them to figure out what it was!). No need to recover windows and apps, it was just their personal stuff they were after.
I then also used dupe checkers and programs like BadPeggy to eliminate trash, bad JPEGs or dupes, because there were a lot of both!

[Amiga1992]

I didn't need the deep scan, the hard drive seems in pretty good shape, which makes me even more puzzled about what the fuck just happened to it.
Usually when I got this kinda problem where the partition goes to shit, it's because of some power failure, improper unplugging or resetting/freezing in the middle of a disk operation. None of this happened this time, I was decompressing some files with WinRAR and the system suddenly said "the file isn't there, I can't copy it" and then all folders showed up empty and after a reset, the drive partition wouldn't show up anymore.

But I've done the "no filename" deep scan shit before to recover photos from an HFS volume. I think I still have those recovered photos with the random filenames the software I used then put on them.

[Amiga1992]

Well GetDataBack has indeed saved my ass

I checked all files and the files recovered are OK. I got all my Amiga files back!
Double copied them on another backup hard drive, and on SD cards. Seems to me that memory cards are more reliable for this kinda shit than a hard drive will ever be, but then again, I could be well wrong.

Now I have no idea what to do with this hard drive. The warranty just passed so I can't return it. And after the meltdown it had I just don't trust it!
Suggestions?
I guess to begin with I'll try to securely format it to wipe the data, just in case I have to throw it to the garbage.

[Daedalus]

Excellent news! that's some feeling of relief you must have Yeah, I'd heard that those drives could be flaky alright, will be avoiding them myself here (all 1 & 2TB drives...) I didn't realise your backup had failed too, that's just pants!

I wouldn't trust it myself either, but it would be interesting to see what the SMART data says about it, and maybe give it a few cycles of writing and reading to see how it behaves. You could always write to them and complain anyway - the warranty might be gone, but they might still offer you something given the reputation of those drives. Warranty period is not the same as life expectancy after all...

As for memory card / SSD reliability, I don't know really. Filesystem corruption won't be any different really. Memory cards can also just fail 100% without any hope of recovery, and without the warning you sometimes get from mechanical drives, but on the other hand they're far more robust when it comes to moving them around.

At least now you have a nice opportunity to make more backups

[Axxy]

Now I have no idea what to do with this hard drive. The warranty just passed so I can't return it. And after the meltdown it had I just don't trust it!
Suggestions?
I guess to begin with I'll try to securely format it to wipe the data, just in case I have to throw it to the garbage.

I can help with this. I formatted some old drives I had with a lump hammer in the garden before binning them. Laptop drives are easier, they just shatter into millions of pieces.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Axxy

I formatted some old drives I had with a lump hammer in the garden before binning them.

Sir, you just put a whole new meaning to the phrase" formatting a hard drive"

[rsn8887]

Congratulations for getting your files back. My last hard drive crash was on my A1200 back when I was 17 or so and I lost everything. My heart literally sank into my stomach after I realized all my configs, my e-mails and all my aminet downloads, it was all gone.

I have kept backups every three or four months since then. My backups are in a physically different location than my main hard discs.

For all my work stuff I also use dropbox, to have a copy in the cloud.

Luckily, with emulation stuff there are now many excellent emulation archives such as TOSEC or goodsets, etc. which make it easier to get all the stuff back. Back in the day I got my adfs by clicking on single links on planetemu or some such.

I remember back in the day shortly after that I basically copied these CDroms from friends filled with ADF images. Even before that I started to convert my own disk collection to adf but that took forever.