F&@*%$ing external drive has died.

[FridgeMagnet]

eh, fuck your hard drive

oops, too late

 

[tarannau]

If only you had a Mac and Leopard you'd have made backups using the natty Time Machine feature and avoided this whole sorry saga Wintermute.




<non helpful intervention over>

 

[Boris Sprinkler]

it is non helpful. you need more space than the host disk to store it.

 

[Crispy]

 

[Radar]

RAID 0 would make no sense.
RAID 1 would allow you an on the fly backup but would be a pain.

I'd find some freeware that just duplicates all the files on one drive to the other once a day. Simple but effective.

cron + rsync = job done

Well not really, I don't like the idea of having external drives up and running 24x7. I'd rather just power them up and mount em when I need em, otherwise I'd have bought a cheaper & faster internal drive in the first place.

Kindly take your practical solutions to ongoing problems somewhere else and allow GENUINE posters the opportunity to share their DEEPEST CONDOLENCES at my - MY - irreconcilable and entirely avoidable loss.

you fuckers

((((wintermute's pr0n collection))))

And heres a message from the heart!

</ObNelson>

 

[Xanadu]

It sounds a little wacky, but you could chuck the drive (just the drive not the enclosure) in the freezer. Put it in an anti-static bag, then a plastic bag, with some sachets of silica gel. Put that in a freezer for a couple of hours, then take it out, and connect it directly to your computer. You may be lucky enough to get the data off. I've done it quite a few times, and it's worked at least twice.

That's assuming you haven't forked out for pro-data recovery and are resigned to the device being broken/out of warranty.

If you like, I can try to get the data off. I've got a copy of EasyRecovery Pro - it's saved my arse on many occasions.

 

[lobster]

I discovered a procram called Acronis Trueimage which takes a snapshot of your hard drive and compresses it to a managable size.My c drive is about 51 gig and gets compressed to about 6 gig.It takes about 20 minutes to back up the full drive and the same to put it back on.It leaves Norton Ghost far behind in my opinion.It would be no good for the problems the above poster has but for people who install a lot of software it's a really simple solution.It must be if I can use it

What it like with mp3 and films? i was under the impression that they are compressed already , so squeezing more memory would be negligible at best.

 

[rhod]

I'd find some freeware that just duplicates all the files on one drive to the other once a day. Simple but effective.

I'd go along with that, although I'd probably make it a weekly or maybe fortnightly backup as a daily one would be a bit of a pain. Obviously it depends on the amount and importance of every bit of data, but with general video and audio files losing a week's worth of data wouldn't be too much of a hardship to me personally.

Program like SyncBack is pretty flexible and free. If you forget to have your devices properly connected when the backup is scheduled, it'll generate a cross little log message with all the files/folders it couldn't backup

 

[Kanda]

Those aren't the ones you can't have two connected to the same computer are they? Think it was WD drives that had exactly that problem...

I have 2 connected at once.

 

[Crispy]

I think it was daisychaining them that was the problem

 

[Radar]

I think it was daisychaining them that was the problem

Yep.. BTW the 2nd drive arrived this morning and I came within a hair's breadth of trashing the bastard thing by trying to reflash it to fix that exact daisychain problem

Fired up the lappie into XP to do the flash upgrade and cunting ZoneAlarm decided to "Pull an ET" and try to call home just as the reflashing kicked off. The nett result was a nice shiney silver box which wasn't even recognised as a WD MyBook Pro any more, but a "Blank Oxford USB device" (Oxford Semiconductors being a 1394 chipset vendor WDC use)

Did a bit of googling and it wasn't looking good. The consensus seemed to be either RMA it back (Annoying but not really a problem for me, I'd only just bought the drive and so there was no data on it for WDC to lose) or pop the case and use the drive as an internal drive (as the underlying disk was fine, I'd only trashed the enclosure). Attempting to flash it with the WDC 1.08a upgrade util again failed as the utils didn't recognise the drive no matter what ! Attempting to let XP delete and reinstall device support for it did sod all either apart from making me feel even sicker

"Oh bugger" thinks I "You've bricked it !! Time to eat crow and try to get it RMAed"

But on the WDC site itself I found a pointer to unofficial support fora, one of which was for the Mybook range. In there I read about a beta version of the full uploader product Oxford supply being used to ressurect a similar mybook. Combining that beta with the actual flash and config files pulled from the failed WDC 1.08a upgrade install produced a result and the drive is up and grinding away on a DD as I type, and once again its being recognised as a HD on 1394 as well as USB

See, computing isn't always unrelenting blood, sweat and tears.















It's just that 90% of the time

 

[rhod]

fuck....I love happy endings - well done for your perseverence, mate!

 

[noriise]

same problem - lost my entire electronica collection! major gash

try using spinrite or hd disk recovery

these programs work very well - something like scandisk is total wank - u dont want to use it. spinrite etc.. will keep ur data safe.