Hard disk failure recovery - This is how you do it

Peter Ehlert, post: 421400, member: 60 wrote: Hard disk failure recovery - This is how you do it
http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/hard-disk-failure-recovery.html

I have a few failed drives, I will see if I can recover one or two

I just make sure that my important data is stored on a redundant RAID array. Hard drive fails I just trash and replace. I'm not so worried about failure now that I'm using SD so I have kind of let the redundant RAID drop and gone with a 0 array.

John Putnam, post: 423728, member: 1188 wrote: now that I'm using SD

What is SD?
I have never used RAID. I do automatic data backups, and I do rotate drives regularly, and archive the old ones.

Peter Ehlert, post: 423750, member: 60 wrote: What is SD?

Possibly he meant SSD. Solid State Drive.

Knock on wood....................
I've had power source failure, hardware failure and operating system crashing.
Hard drive failure, not yet.
I keep a kit to power up a hard drive and connect USB to any computer for data retrieval.
The 1tb to 4tb drives are very economical and are about the size of a deck of cards and hot connect to computers just like thumb drives and can be loaded and kept apart from office and home for security.
I recently added a WD 4tb drive to hold everything in the several 1`tb drives.
Also have an OTG Phone Connector to view data from thumb drives on my phone...

both heat and shock kill hard drives.
I have half a dozen drives that died from heat in laptops. They make cute paperweights now.
I also have a brand new high end 4tb drive that died when I gently bounced it during the install (old man fumble fingers). That one especially irritates me because it was 75% full after spending hours with it on a dongle making a nicely organized set of backups and partitions.
When I went to slip it into the case, OOPS! (no data was lost, only copies)

Peter,

Just getting back in play after racing in central Mexico. SD was in fact missing the second S, I meant solid state drives. As for the RAID, I used them for redundancy and read/write speed improvement. I also back up the drive to an offsite drive hourly.

Interesting this thread popped back up, today. I just got my machine back from a RAID failure. Interesting thing, I knew I had a RAID array; however, I didn't know much about RAID other than it would be good for file access and (I thought) protection. Turns out, my machine came with a RAID '0' array. That's a zero.

For those that don't know, I learned that Raid 0 is a "striping" technique, where subsequent portions of larger files is written first to one drive, next portion to the second, next portion to the first, and back-and-forth until the entire file is written. Therefore, it "stripes" the file between the 2 drives for fast access on magnetic (HDD), spinning drives.

Problem: If one drive fails, you only have some of the stripes necessary to access the entirety of a given file. Alternately stated, you're (&**((#$-ed..

Note: Apparently, small files aren't compromised because they aren't big enough to stripe. I don't know what the threshold is.

So, I thought I was (&**((#$-ed.

Short, happy story for me. It was Intel's RAID controller software that was acting buggy. My local, down the street/ drop-in IT guy (thanks again, Billy), was able to image my hard-drive (actually two drives in the striped config) onto a new SSD. He then converted the old raid setup into a RAID '1" system. Raid "one" that will make a mirror image of any data I store on the "single" drive. If either RAID drive fails, you have an onboard backup. Swap out the failed drive and RAID immediately copies each file to the new drive and RAID"s on.

For the record, ALL my business is kept on an external drive that is backed up monthly to another external drive and I have a spare machine that is at least loaded to go ( just not dialed in). So, I wasn't dead. The major problem, I didn't have my drafting preferences, plotter configs', MS Office... any of the stuff that was on the boot drive. So, it still sucked and I was damn shaky for a day or two.

So, if you have RAID. Look into which version. If it's "zero", get it changed. Quick.

[USER=7900]@back-chain[/USER]
15yrs ago I spent a lot of money for a major upgrade of a computer that was to have a raid array (hard drive storage with hard drive backup) where I could save once and it be on several hard drives for security and backup.
When the motherboard went out it was like changing the mother board out with the same part and then plug everything in an here we go.
In checking the system setting, found out that I did indeed have the necessary hardware installed for a raid array, except the original never was an actual raid setup.
All the backups were zero data and never were in use.
Original puter guru failed to setup all those hard drives as an array.
With all that, I changed directions and set each hard drive up as an individual drive and spread them thru multiple puters so each would have at least one drive for programs only and one drive for data only and a few had an extra hard drive for music and movies only.
Then I got several of these hotplugin external hard drives that I can plug into a computer and overnight copy everything into the backup data external drives.
For backup there are:
one 3tb Western Digital My Book connected thru wifi to all computers
one 2tg WD passport plug & play
one 4tb WD passport plug & play
and about a dozen thumb drives from 4gb to 128gb to store, backup and carry data.
I added a dwg viewer on my android and have a thumb drive that has all my drawings and property descriptions so I can pull them up on my phone.

Roger that Mr. Harris. Definitely glad I keep ALL my business on external media with a second backup from that. The "dozen thumb-drives" makes me laugh at myself. I've got a bumper crop growing as I get one> use it for transport> forget it> need it> buy another> repeat. So far, though, I've remembered to get everything onto the external backups.

Looking like a busy spring/ summer/ fall. Hope everyone's data stays safe and your files constantly grow. Later,

Everything I do is backed up to Google Drive