Hi Chris

sorry to hear of the loss of data. new laptop sounds superb though

stew

 

Hi, Chris

Replacing platters? Are you sure? Hard disks haven't had exposed platters for ... well, since forever. They're built in high-spec clean rooms. the heads float about the platters at a height of a few microns, on a cushion of air created by the rushing of the disks underneath them. The heads are aerodynamically designed to fly over the disks. If you opened up the drive to see the heads and plattters, they'd be duffed immediately.

I was in a big Tesco this monring, and in their 'tech' section, they had many USB hard disk drives and several USB memory sticks, Cheap as chips.

I agree with your point about using the external drive as a system drive. They're far too easy to trash, as you found out. I go a bit nuts at teachers using USB sticks stuck into laptops permanently, and editing precious documents straight onto the sticks. "The stick is a backup and transfer medium" I say. Lots. A deputy head asked me to print something off her stick. It had around 180Mbytes of data on it. "You do have a backup of this?" I asked. The look on her face gave me the answer. I ran through a list of methods by which the whole stick could be trashed, and I backed it onto a CD-ROM straight away.

I know people who've never taken a backup of their documents. Digital photos? Well, they're stored on the hard disk (and therefore, safe). All those precious photos, able to disappear with a mechanical mishap or malicious piece of software.

Rant over. Everyone should backup their data at least every month. CD-ROMs cost pennies, and can store loads of documents. backup of high-res digital photos needs more space. USB disks are good, but not infallible.

Gerald

 

Sorry, Good luck with the new laptop. It sounds enormous :? Would it have been better to get a 'normal' laptop, and use an external monitor?

Gerald

 

Hi Chris
Sorry to hear your story mate. We use a Netgear SC101 Mass Storage device (I think it is called a NAS Drive???) to back up all our company info. We then load it into the RV and take with us when we go away. It has 2 x mirror drives and is designed to function even if one drive is totalled, never tried it though :roll: :roll:
I think that there are a couple of companies that specialise in data recovery from broken hard drives, of course it will depend upon the nature of the failure.... and I also understand that it is hugely expensive as they need clean rooms as said earlier. I guess Gerald is correct in that once it has been opened up to the atmosphere then any dust particle getting into the unit will trash it, as the tolerances are microscopic..... Have you tried any other companies for data retrieval? Might be worth a try if the information is really important. Just a thought, as your plumber seems to have caused this crash, is he insured? If so it may be worth pursuing some partial data recovery company and getting his insurers to foot the bill.
Your new laptop sounds fabulous though, so good news for that eh?? :lol: :lol:

See you soon matey

Keith

 

Use a netgear SC101 NAS (network attached storage) it houses two hard drives with the capeabilty of mutiple partitions and RAID mirror type array

for example Drive 1 is mirrored on Drive 2, meaning more resiliance for disk faliure. it also comes with sync software so backups are simple and can be automated and programed for system start up, data changes and much more. I am sure if you had the kit you could VPN to it and back up on the move its a good way for backups of mobile users especialy where a server solution is OTT or just to expensive.

Dont be put off by external hard drives, if you have the correct one they can be priceless its just a matter of backups regular you could even have one in work and one at home if you are that paranoid.

Its to late now but i have used this methord t o get a disc going to just copy data from one to abother. Get a freezer bag put disk in freeze over night, have aworking pc on standby to install frozen disc, cross fingers + pray install in pc boot to windows or DOS and copy data as fast as you can.

 

Hi Chaps,

Thanks for the info.

Yes I did take the hard drive apart, but this was a last ditch effort once two specialist companies said they could not help.

Gerald, you are totally correct with your description, I tried as an experiment to restore the last drive with the three original platters and it would not work again. But nothing ventured nothing gained and it only cost £120 for the now two duff hard drives.

Got up this morning at 02:30 having woken at 01:30 and trying to put as much of the various bits of data that where on the hard drive together on the new back up external 750gb hard drive.

Have a lot more info in the office but cannot for the life of me remember when I backed it up last - what a twit!

I do have two flat screens, one in the office and one at home, but the extra added benefit of this new laptop is it will also become my additional tv and dvd player in the Winnie. I hasten to add the data will of course be backed up every night and most certainly before taking it into the Winnie!

I have also bought two docking stations with it and if the screen is not that brilliant I will still continue to use the flat screens and cordless keyboards and mice. I hope the screen is as good as it appears to be as this will make my desks a little tidier.

I have a new normal sized and specced laptoop that I bought for use on site so this one will only go between office, home and motorhome!

Oh well back to the benchmark testing. I am trying to decide which pc I will use as the family one at home. The current one is a pentium 4 2.0ghz and my desktops which will no longer be used are AMD Athalon 64 3000+.

Mine is newer and seems faster so trying to use 3DMark03 and 06 for benchmarking at the moment.

Really should try and sleepzzzzzzzzz

Regards

Chris

 

I know what it's like when you get into something interesting and technical. Sleep is just so boring!

It sounds like you have the system pretty well set up there. Of course, the big laptop as a TV / DVD player makes excellent sense.

Enjoy playing!

Gerald

 

Lap top

Hi

I do not have a clue about platters or anything else but the new lap top does sound like a good piece of kit.

Rapide561

 

All this talk about replacing platters takes me back to the early 70s when hard drives on an IBM 360 were replacable. The disk units looked like large LP records in stacks with two part plastic covers. The read heads were built into the drive unit and moved in and out to allow stack replacement.

You had to remove the bottom cover from the stack, put the stack on the spindle, remove the top cover and close the unit so that the disks would spin up to speed.

Removal was the reverse but you had to wait until the disks stopped spinning before you could put the top cover on. There were big notices on the wall "On no account must operators use their fingers to slow down spinning disks".

Graham

 

Hi Graham
You made me laugh with your memories :lol: :lol:
The first mainframe I had the pleasure to work on had a core memory which was just a great big lump of iron that spun around at enormous speeds, and a matrix memory which was like a web with little iron rings at each junction :lol: :lol: :lol:
The main computer was made up of hundreds of discreet circuits all contained in *** packet sized cans for easy removal / replacement and the input was via a Mylar tape reader..... The mainframe had its own power supply (generator) and air conditioning unit and was a massive 32 kilobyte (if I remember correctly....) with hundreds of lights on the face door. Each computer (there were two in parallel) had four access doors, each being about 5 foot high by 2 foot wide, which could be opened up to allow access for cleaning and maintenance. You could actually walk right through the machine ( well I was a tad smaller then too) :lol: :lol:
Guess things have changed a little then???? :lol: :lol: :lol:

Keith

 

We used an IBM 1620 at college. Whilst I was there they installed an ICL 1900. Trouble was it had been stood in the warehouse at West Gorton for 6 months whilst they got the room ready. The engineers had found it easier to obtain replacement parts from that machine rather than the stores so it took them ages to get the thing to work

When I started my first job the council had just bought an IBM 360 to replace an IBM 1440 so I had to learn 1440 Autocoder as well as Cobol. Not the easiest of languages but a bit of a step up from machine code. Perhaps that's why I found reading core dumps so easy.

Mainframes in those days had a "panic button" to stop the thing in an emergency. On the IBM machines it was a small handle - you hooked your fingers behind it and pulled and it blew a fuse. The ICL machines had a push button and blew the circuit that just happened to be live at the time. Some twit installed the panic button near a wall mounted bookshelf. A rather well endowed lady operator stretched up one day to reach a manual and the inevitable happened. Took them a fortnight to trace the circuit which had blown

Graham

 

Chris -

I have always been a fan of removable backups and still have a Syquest drive and disks (125M and 250M :!: ) on an old PC. Three years ago I bought a 160G maxtor which still works fine for backups - although I have never yet had to call on it to bail me out.

It horrifies me to think of storing 700+G of important data in such a device and I cannot imagine what would need so much space. Do you really need the whole 700G to be with you all the time?

I would have thought it would be safest to store this quantity on multiple RAM DVDs (4G each) and then only carry the ones you need all the time.
I think I would also arrange some online backup storage.

Paul

 

Hi Paul,

I have a lot of digital photos and music and that is just the family computer which is what I will back up to the 750GB external disc. Along with favourites from explorer and any files the family want to keep.

For my work side I will back up on to the 400GB drive.

The point is I am only going to use these hard drives for back up. Now I have and am using at this moment the new and amazing acer 20" laptop, I don't need to use an external hard drive between my office and my study. When this happened last week I realised that the external hard drive was too vulnerable and had been very badly treated by me as well!

With regards to DVD's I could not imagine the quantity that I would have to keep and my experience of using DVD's for backup is they are not reliable anyway.

Just trying to get all of the data together and currently going through the first 1000 emails. I keep emails on my server for 30 days. This is very fortunate as it allowed me to re view all of my recent emails again.

Regards

Chris

 

My most valuable pictures are the 1200 slides taken to record an archaeological dig circa 1979-1884. Just this last month I have scanned them all at 4000 dpi and managed to fit on one DVD RAM. I have specifically chosen DVD RAM disks for the main archive since these are reckoned to be 100s times more reliable than regular DVDRWs. Mind you they still do not like being sat on! In addition to those I have also run off regular DVD copies.

As regards emails I have just started using Googlemail which gives free 2G secure storage online. This is where all my mail goes first. Spam is mostly eliminated without me needing to download anything. I then go through the emails on Gmail and only keep and file those I need. Lastly I fire up Outlook express which downloads all organised and saved emails which then get stored on my PC. So I am really using Google for my backup and that would be available online.

I will be seeking a DVD RAM option if I buy a new Laptop although an external Combo DVD RAM could be another option.