HDD failure!

[earok]

Not strictly CD32 related but can't think where to post this.

So I had a hard drive failure, last full backup was some four months ago. Unfortunately means I'll need to restart some releases that were largely done, including a fair bit of the stuff I had done for Wonderboy.

If anyone has any suggestions for some sort of shared cloud setup where people working on CD32 conversions can share their work, that would be great

[Amiga1992]

I tend to hate Dropbox, but it might be the best solution for everyone.
Otherwise, Google Drive or Onedrive from Microsoft.

[dirkies]

Are you sure the drive is not recoverable?

[earok]

Not totally sure. The drive letter shows up when I put it in an external caddy, but I can't browse it at all. I've tried a couple of different recovery tools with no luck.

[dirkies]

GetDataBack always does the trick for me, tried many many tools (also because we need those sometimes where I worked) and GDB was always the only one getting back all the stuff from hopelessly corrupted drives. It does take sometimes a lot of time (esp with HDDs of +500GB) but it's worth the wait!
Last time recovered data from 750GB drive that also just showed letter, but even refused to be formatted. (seemingly bad sector treshold exceeded causing hardware to go into read-only mode but with a corrupt structure already in place!). It took 3 days for full scan and recovered all data just fine!
Check PM

[Amigajay]

Damn sorry to hear that Earok, i hate when alot of hard work goes down the drain whatever work it is its gut wrenching sometimes, happened to me some years ago, i hope you can recover it somehow, if not then yes we need a shared file service. I have dropbox but its only free and i don't have alot of free space to upload big iso's which I'm working on atm, I'll prob still use Mega and share files that way or just back-up some important stuff every week or so.

[earok]

@dirkies thanks for the advice! I'll try it out.

@amigajay I hire a website from HostGator with supposedly unlimited FTP storage, I could look at some kind of FTP sync solution. That way all of our cool stuff is up there on the cloud

[Amiga1992]

I recently had hard drive disaster and dirkies' advice was pretty good. Eventually after that, I found this totally free solution that also worked great, the Ultimate Boot CD:
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/


Do not lose hope until you pass your drive through GetDataBack or UBCD.
Check out my thread about hard drive failure sorrow, good tips within: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=80519
GetDataBack you can try the LiveCD for free and if it works out you can add the license and recover your data.

[Ian]

If it shows up then I have repaired several dodgy HDDs using chkdsk with the /x switch.

[ReadOnlyCat]

Before you fix or reformat the kitten, make a full raw copy of the HD content.
This way, even if it cannot be restored now you will at least be able to retry later if better tools are discovered.



But yes, let us repeat it a thousand times:

Backup, everything, all the time.
Use redundant backups (home, cloud).

[dirkies]

Never use chkdsk please as it will alter the drive making things potentially worse!
Use a read-only forensic tool like GDB instead.