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[drohne]

woke up this morning to my powerbook making horrible clicking noises. can't get it to boot anymore, assume the disk is dead. everything really important is backed up, but would i be able to recover the data off that disk without spending loads of money? there's some pornography on there i'll miss.

 

[marsomega]

woke up this morning to my powerbook making horrible clicking noises. can't get it to boot anymore, assume the disk is dead. everything really important is backed up, but would i be able to recover the data off that disk without spending loads of money? there's some pornography on there i'll miss.

It sucks about what happened to your powerbook but this line is just classic with sad face and all!!

:lol :lol :lol

 

[Seth C]

Try removing the hard disk and putting it in the freezer for an hour or so.

 

[DrEvil]

Try removing the hard disk and putting it in the freezer for an hour or so.

put it in a plastic bag first, or else moisture condensation == electrical sparkage

 

[Lyte Edge]

Try removing the hard disk and putting it in the freezer for an hour or so.

I've got an external hard drive that's been dead for some months now. Could I possibly revive it with this method or is it too late by now?

 

[Phoenix]

There is, but most of the methods are absurdly expensive. You CAN try putting the drive into an external chasis and seeing if data can be read that way. If it can - bad news, might be a controller in the PB.

I just started the PB death watch for mine. 2 days ago I dropped mine down a flight of stairs. Amazingly there wasn't much damage outside of the physical case itself being horribly bent, the lid not being able to close, and the power supply being shattered into many many pieces. I was surprised that it came on at all to be honest. After investigating it for an hour I powered it on and have been using it ever since. Still waiting on a replacement powercord from macsales - should show up tomorrow.

 

[Seth C]

I've got an external hard drive that's been dead for some months now. Could I possibly revive it with this method or is it too late by now?

Putting the disk in the freezer will not "revive" it really, but in many cases it will cause the drive to be readable for long enough to recover the data from it, before it fails again.

 

[Brannon]

Have you considered a feeding tube? I hear they're quite effective and are all the rage these days...

 

[fart]

follow phoenix's advice. make sure it's the drive before you figure out what to do. or put anything in any freezers

 

[enjoy bell woods]

My external died three days ago. With it went about 90 GB of music.

The thing was fried, and I couldn't turn it on anymore. The hard drive was clicking and freezing on me about two days prior.

 

[Ruzbeh]

I've had near-death experiences with my hard drive(s). Really, what is up with that. I want a reliable storage medium damnit.

 

[fart]

regular backups, people.

 

[Diablos]

Pry it open and look inside. Hard drives look cool.

 

[automagnus]

Pry it open and look inside. Hard drives look cool.

And useful

 

[border]

Random question so long as we are talking about hard drives:

I have an old HD from a computer that broke long ago....if I simply hook it up to my current system IN PLACE of my current HD, will it boot up without any problems? Right now my PC is having a lot of problems, and I'm thinking that if I try it with an old HD then I can at least isolate whether my problems are in the software or in the hardware. Plus the old HD had some good pornography on it.

 

[Shogmaster]

Random question so long as we are talking about hard drives:

I have an old HD from a computer that broke long ago....if I simply hook it up to my current system IN PLACE of my current HD, will it boot up without any problems? Right now my PC is having a lot of problems, and I'm thinking that if I try it with an old HD then I can at least isolate whether my problems are in the software or in the hardware. Plus the old HD had some good pornography on it.

It would be a miracle if it boots with the configurations from the old computer. You will have to format and reinstall windows on that old HD if you want to test things out. If you want to salvage the old pron, you want to install that old drive as a slave drive first.

 

[drohne]

thanks for the tips. i'll try an external housing, and if that doesn't work, i'll...pop it in the freezer? i hope it's just the drive and not my powerbook...laptop repair costs are a bitch, and i didn't want to buy a new one until the intel models showed up. :/

 

[border]

It would be a miracle if it boots with the configurations from the old computer.

The old HD is running Win98....so it's not like XP where the OS would suddenly find all this different hardware and choose to shut down. Why is it that the old OS installation wouldn't simply treat the new computer as new hardware and just go about finding and installing the proper drivers?

 

[aoi tsuki]

The old HD is running Win98....so it's not like XP where the OS would suddenly find all this different hardware and choose to shut down. Why is it that the old OS installation wouldn't simply treat the new computer as new hardware and just go about finding and installing the proper drivers?

Chances are that's what it would do. But it's really best to do as Shog suggested, run it as a slave, give it a full surface scan just in case.

Ironically enough, i'm about to run to a friend's house to install her old hard drive in her new Dell. :/

 

[border]

Chances are that's what it would do. But it's really best to do as Shog suggested, run it as a slave, give it a full surface scan just in case.

Yeah, but I have no idea how to do that. As in "I wouldn't even know how to physically connect it, much less configure the system to boot to it". I figured it'd be much more simple my way -- pull the plugs out of the the current HD and put them into the new one. A substitute HD is easier than an additional HD.