| Author | Message | ||
     Blake |
My Dell Inspiron 5000e laptop's 20 GB hard drive cratered yesterday. Won't boot or even yield any meaningful results from diagnostic routine. Before I have Dell send me a new one to swap out (3 year warranty is a good thing) I would like to recover, if possible some recent files that I do not have backed up. What is my best/cheapest avenue for that? Thanks for your help, Blake | ||
| Libnosis |
Blake Try booting from a floppy then accessing your hard drive. It may only be your boot sector that is messed up. Good luck. lib | ||
| Sarodude |
Blake- You have mail... -Saro | ||
| Blake |
Lib, She won't boot from CD. I don't have a bootable diskette.  | ||
| Bjack |
Blake, Same thing happened to me earlier this year. Called Dell tech support and they were very helpful. The had me try several different tricks but never could boot up. My laptop could not even find the hard drive or any operating system. Eventually gave up and they sent out a new hard drive, no questions asked. Learned my lesson the hard way about backing up. Try calling Dell tech (if you haven't already done so). Good luck with recovering your data. | ||
| Sarodude |
What hardware do you have available? When working on laptop disks, I find it easiest to use a 40 - 44 pin (I think) adapter and hook the laptop disk to a regular PC. Those adapters can be had for just a few bucks. -Saro | ||
| Jim_M |
Blake... Got to http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/beta8/disksets/ and download the base1.zip file. This will give you a bootable DOS disk. (You may need the rawrite.exe program available at http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/beta8/) Now you should be able to boot your laptop and search around for your files (unless you hd is toast  ). I've found that freeDOS is a very nifty source to keep around (though I'm on a Mac now  , so it loses it's immediate usefulness to me). Let me know if that works for you. | ||
| Josh |
Blake, you have mail. What OS were you running? Josh | ||
| Reepicheep |
Blake... They have those hard drive adapters (laptop to desktop internal cable adapter) at the Fry's on the other end of Dallas (Arlington) if you are going to be up that way. I bought one there a month ago. Local "Mom & Pop" computer stores may have them as well. If the computer won't even boot from CDRom, then you probably have a CPU / motherboard problem, not a disk problem (probably). If the hard drive won't even be recognized by the desktop at boot time (by the bios) or with a single floppy disk linux distribution (Toms RTBT is very nice), then it is more then likely toast. There is a small chance that it is the controller that is broken and the actual mechanics are fine, but I have never seen that to be the case, especially if it was a failure over time (funny behavior for days, hours, or minutes until the system becomes un bootable). If it was the electronics, you could find an identical model drive, and just swap the PC board, but even that might not work (they probably store bad sector / geometry / calibration data somewhere onboard). Throw the drive in a desktop (as a second drive, probably a slave to the main hard drive, or just pull the CDRom for a while and strap the hard drive to be whatever the CDRom was, can be Master or Slave). If it is just a bad sector in an important (boot or operating system) area, you might get stuff out. If it is a gradual failure, every second the drive runs, the more data you will loose. On more then one occasion I have been frantically chasing bad data as the disk crumbles beneath me, trying to decide what files were the most important to try and recover. Have a plan before you start, copy files quickly to the host PC normal disk. That being said, toasted drives are usually toast anymore. It's been years since I had any success actually recovering anything, and I have seen plenty of bad drives in that time. Hope it was not one of Aarons drives  At least you know who to blame  | ||
| Josh |
<!-Attachment-!> ![](http://www.badweatherbikers.com/buell/icons/attachment_icon.gif" ALT="1,200 ways to recover a dead hard drive){kind=icon} Lots of repeated stuff, you really need to sort through before you try anything. Nevermind, it's almost 500k and only zips to 100k. | ||
| Blake |
Thanks guys! The rest of the story... Dell Inspiron 5000e P3-750MHz 320 MB RAM Windows 2000 Hitachi Model DK23BA-20 20GB HD with 42 pin connector, Format: FAT32 Have External HD (Western Digital 30GB) connects via PCMCIA IEEE 1394 Have external CDRW Internal CD/DVD Intenal Diskette Drive Failure consists of not being able to boot... "Operating System not found" "alt"-"ctrl"-"d" upon boot-up yields IDE drive diagnostic that produces no results. HD makes clicking/knocking noise. Noticed same knocking noise infrequently for past few months. Happened when booting up, coming out of hibernation, or even while in use. Loud knock, loud enough to make me think, "damn, what the hell was that?!" Noise was like a good finger snap. I should have known the drive was failing, but it gave me no other indication other than the noise. Probably is seized. Will try boot diskette; if that is not successful will try freezing it and will try some light encouragement to get it to restart and get desired files copied to external HD. If not successful as primary drive, I may try to access it as a slave from my desktop. Not sure if connector is the same though. With the noises it is making however, I'm pretty sure its mechanical workings are the culprit. Last alternative is to send to hard drive recovery professionals (expensive). Again, thanks for your help. Any further suggestions are more than welcome. Thanks for your suggestions. Blake | ||
| Josh |
>that produces no results No results? No display, nothing? >Not sure if connector is the same though Probably not, you'll probably need an adapter as referenced above. Also I don't have alot of experience with FireWire hard drives but unless the laptop supports it in BIOS I don't think you'll see that external drive from a DOS/UNIX boot disk. Josh | ||
| Reepicheep |
Where is Aaron in all this stuff? I would think that he would be 'da man. Unless he is handcuffed from participation by NDA's or something. I see. DOS won't boot off the external CDRoms, even when things are NOT screwed up. You will have to boot off a floppy. Try your freezer thing (clever!) and see if the drive spins up. Wear gloves if typing on a laptop submerged in a liquid nitrogen bath, and hit the return key gently The sounds you describe are exactly like what my laptop drive did on my last business trip to Arlington (must be a Texas thing). I had to replace the drive at 3am in a hotel after a 20 hour day with no tools besides the key to a rental car. I did a post mortem on mine, and it felt like the servo arm motor was fried / siezed (though I might have damaged it getting the cover off, hard to tell for sure). Not sure who suffered the most, me, the key, or the laptop, but we were all pretty whipped at the end. If the bearing is shot, it seems to me that there is a good chance the heads have damaged the platter, the tolerance on those things is measured in microns. Could be the head servo is siezed... if the freezer thing does not work, its probably toast. Mine was. Laptop drives take one heck of a beating, especially when you travel. Sorry about your data loss. Annoying and time consuming. You will need the adapter if you want to try it in your desktop, the pin count is similiar but the connector density is much higher for the laptop drive. The "converter" is passive, should only run about $5 or so, and your local Fry's has it. You can probably make a boot disk from your desktop, windows calls it a recovery disk, and hides the creation tool really well. It is (I recall, I am running Linux now) start-> settings-> Control Panel -> Add / Remove software , then find the "startup disk" tab. It will prompt you for a blank floppy, and when it is done you should have a bootable floppy. Of course, if your bios does not even recognize the drive, this won't help you, and DOS will never see it. Linux (like Toms RTBT single disk) bypasses the bios for a lot of this sort of stuff and might be able to see it where DOS can't, but again, its a long shot. Bill | ||
| Tbolt834 |
Blake, Even when hard drives seem to be really toasted, the manufacturer of the laptop or drive can most often retrieve files from it at their factory using tools developed during product design. The cost is usually between $250 and $400 dollars, depending on what was on it, may be worth it. The next question though, tell us you don't have a current backup on some form of mass storage. Dave | ||
| Dust_Storm |
IF the clicking is a constant, once twice a second with regulari intervals, it's usually an HD81 error, which means the read head is not leaving the park magnet. This is a mechanical failure, not recoverable. If the harddrive sounds like it's spinning out of control, eg, it goes to max rpm instantly and doesn't stop, it's an HD21 error, the servo for the platter has gone wild, again, mechanical. If there is no fromt he HDD at all, it's an HD08 error, and the servo is not engauging. Mechanical again. So long as the drive doesn't have a mechanical fault (if you've blown the circut board, you can re-attach another circut board from a similar model and it will still work) the data can still be accessed. The easiest of ways is like a few people mentioned earlier. Pick up a 2.5 HDD to 3.5 HDD Adapter (can be had for as little as 10 dollars) and mount the drive in a desktop machine. You then can use whatever software you are comfortable with (Undelete v2.0, Powerquest makes some recovery software, etc) and try again. If it's only your MBR that's corrupted, you can run an FDISK /MBR to try and recover it, however, this doesn't work on NT based systems. Bottom line, if it's mechanical, it's gone, if it's FAT, or MBR, it can be resurrected. [Ds] | ||
| Bluzm2 |
Blake, If it turns out that the drive is toast and you really need the data on the drive, Ontrack can retrieve the data and burn it to CD for you. It's not cheap, bit if the data is needed/not backed up and REALLY needed they can recover just about anything. I roached my drive in my laptop late last year. Some data was not replaecable. It cost about $1,400 to retrieve all the data but not one byte was lost. They provided 9 CD's worth of data. I could have done a complete restore from the CD's. Spendy but they get the job done. These are the same folks the feds use for serious data retrival. Brad | ||
| Blake |
Tbolt (Dave), Some files backed up to CDRW. Unfotunately I need the laptop to access the CDRW, since desktop is an old P133 (no USB port). Am talking to the three Dell approved (maintains warranty) data recovery services, Ontrack, Drive Savers, and Action Front Data Recovery Labs. Price ranges from $600 to $3,000 depending on difficulty of retrieval. I'm pretty sure the failure is mechanical, but will try the slave setup with desktop before paying the big bucks. Anyone have a spare HD that will fit my Dell Inspiron 5000e? I can't get a warranty replacement until I'm ready to return the bad one to Dell. Dell certainly doesn't make this easy. | ||
| Court |
Dell certainly doesn't make this easy. Nor do they make anything easy. . . I buy LOTS of stuff from Dell like multiple flat panels at home and a fairly dialed in wireless broadband system. I needed to return one component several months ago. There is not ONE place on their website to do so. The phone was a PITA. Folks laugh at my IBM (5th one) laptop but the last time it went bonkers was a Friday afternoon. I called IBM Quickserve, Airborne shows with a box 45 minutes later, off it goes and I get it back on Monday morning at 10AM. I am not a "power user". I am a "power needer". Keep us posted on how this goes. Court | ||
| Phonemanjustin |
I have had some luck turning hard drives of some failing phone and voicemail systems upside down and giving them a good smack. It has worked several times just long enough to get a good datasave. I have never tried this with a laptop but it couldnt hurt to try. | ||
| Dust_Storm |
Phoneman, in the old voice mail systems (Mytel/Lucent) the HDD's were a bit more robust. You could do the old trick of smacking them to release the accuator from park. Doesn't work real well on the new laptop drives, as it is they sound like a marracca. Funny thing though, the newer Avaya voicemail systems use flashram, the exception being the big boxes, which use a version of *NIX on a 386.. thos HDD's you can smack around  . [Ds] | ||
| Phonemanjustin |
Thinking back most of those drives were about the size of a shoebox. Some of them did sound like they had ball bearings ratteling around in them, it's amazing how long some of those systems lasted. | ||
| Dust_Storm |
The really sick thing is I remember BAKING them. (Hold on there Blake, yes, you really could bake them), especially the old MDF HDD's. If the spindle locked, which happened inevatibly at the very worst moments, I would put them in a conventional oven at 320Deg for 30min. Take them out, and let cool to room temp, then spin them up. The heat actually reset the spindles, never really understood it, but it always worked. Ahhhhhhhh computers.. how I miss the day when I could walk into an establishment and hold them up like a bandit because they're Novell network was down... wow have times changed. [Ds] | ||
| Blake |
Good news, Dell sent me a new/refurbished HDD. It is a 40GB IBM model. Nice of them to do that, since my cratered drive was only a 20 GB model. They also put a note in my file that I sent the failed drive to a data recovery service. The data recovery service will send it directly to Dell once they are finished with it. Took a few phone calls and some patience, but things are looking good from where I sit. I just formatted the new drive for NTFS, installed the OS and will start the lengthy task of installing all the software. Anyone have any suggestions on how to create a swappable 2nd internal HDD that could simply be plugged in to the laptop in case of failure of it's internal HDD. The HDD is not really internal, it just has a single retainer screw to keep it from being easily ejected from its bay. Unfortunately the bios does not allow booting from an external HDD. Is there any way to rig a daisy chain ribbon cable to run one of the disks as a slave? My only other option would be to back up the primary internal HDD to my external HDD, install the OS on a 2nd HDD, then add/update all the files from the external HDD's system/disk backup. What I am after is a spare internal HDD that can be kept up to date (mirror?) the internal HDD. Am I making sense? | ||
| Josh |
Blake, Ghost it once a week to a separate machine, nightly copy updated data files to the 2nd drive. If the HD dies, swap for a new one and restore the last image then copy the latest files. All you need is Ghost, network card, network cable and a diskette. Of if the 2nd drive is big enough, Ghost the image of the primary there and keep copies of the data on each. Josh | ||
| Leeaw |
Blake, I think you are out of luck on the raid idea for a laptop. I learned the hard way on my desktop and now run a mirror setup. So far it has saved me twice. If I recall, some laptops may accept a 2nd internal drive in one of the swap bays, and you could possibly do software mirroring or nightly backup. If this were a possibility, you could reinstall your OS and software, then Ghost it to your desktop, to have an image of a "clean install" and then you would be in good shape. | ||
| Blake |
Desktop is not an option. It is too antiquated (P133). What is the raid idea?? Unfortunately teh laptop will not accept another HDD in any of its other bays, only batteries and/or CD/DVD/diskette drives. I do have an external drive with IEEE1394. BIOS will unfortunately not allow booting from external drive. Please explain "ghosting". I am not familiar with any of this stuff. I'm totally ignorant on the subject of maintaining a mirror or ghost image. How would I go about maintaining such a mirror or ghost backup. How would I use it in the case of a primary HDD failure? Thanks! | ||
| Libnosis |
Blake This is what we use ghost drives. http://enterprisesecurity.symantec.com/products/products.cfm?productID=3 hth lib | ||
| Reepicheep |
Blake... There are two types of backups, each with different strengths. The first has its roots in the Unix utility "tar", which means "tape archive". Basically, it backups copies of the specified files, relative to some fixed starting location in your file system tree, and stores them to some mass storage device (could be a tape drive, could just be a file on another disk). BUT, it works by asking the file system for a copy of the file, and restores it by asking the file system to create a file and then fills it with the right data. Windows zip files are tar files. Pros: Allows subsets of files to be backed up or restored, you can backup everything, then just restore a particular file. It also allows incremental or layering type backups, one master backup with a few daily backups of just the files that have changed since the last master. Cons: When it backs up a file, it depends on the filesystem to be doing its job correctly. If you have a corrupted file allocation table, the "wrong" data is backed up, and the "right" data never gets touched. Also, windows is still a pretty flakey OS, and many types of windows files can not be backed up correctly this way, including such design travesties as "the registry", without which your windows system is a doorstop. Tar works great on Unix though, but that won't help you. The other type of backup is an image backup, which has its roots in the Unix "dd" command. Norton Ghost creates this type of backup. It is basically a bit for bit copy of your hard drive or hard drive partition starting with the first bit and going to the last. It can only be restored this way as well, the backup utility does not use the filesystem and has no sense of files, it thinks it is just backing up one very large file that happens to be your entire drive or partition. Pros: A ghost'd image will restore exactly where it was when you backed it up (though windows has more stupid design elements that complicate the actual backup process, Unix handles it well). It is as close to bullet proof as you can get. Cons: You can't restore a single file, just the whole drive or partition. Likewize, the size of the drive or partition you restore has to match. There are workarounds to these limitations, but you are then back into a "tar" type solution with all the issues there, as the tool is then trying to use the filesystem. A true "image" backup has no sense of what the data being backed up consists of... this is a strength, not a weakness. That being said, the people at Norton have done a ton of work to get around a lot of these issues and Ghost does a very good job, including allowing changes in partition size during transfer. You also cannot (efficiently) do incremental backups, you typically create a whole new image every time you make an extra backup. Also, even if your 20 gig drive only has about 5 gigs of data on it, your backup image is still 20 gigs. You might be able to run the image through a good compression program and shrink it down, but that would depend on the unused parts of the disk containing zeros, or other well ordered data, which most operating systems won't do (they just leave old data on the drive and mark the sector as available). So each has advantages and disavantages. Unfortunately, windows really has no decent backup tools by default, and the tar type aftermarket tools have been really unreliable. Norton Ghost is pretty good, but it has all the limits of the "dd" or "image" type copies I described above. I use one of two approaches. I either dual boot my computers for both Linux and Windows, and use the running Linux system to backup the non currently running Windows system (Linux can mount the windows partitions). This allows (generally) both image and file backups, but also sometimes the file by file backups causes problems when Microsoft bypasses their own rules to eek out a performance advantage (or just out of stupidity). The image backup (one easy command... "dd if=/dev/hda0 of=/dev/rmt0 bs=5M" works every time, but chews through media pretty quick, even if you compress the stream (dd if=/dev/hda0 bs=5M | gzip > /dev/hda0). Frankly, windows gets pretty flakey after between 6 months and a year of hard use anyway as it accumulates old driftwood and generally confuses itself, so I just burn all the data I create (doc files, photos, etc) to CDR discs once a week or so, keep at least one set of them offsite, and just resign myself to reinstalling windows and all my software and modifications once every 6 months to a year on every system I own when something gets snarled up. PITA, but it works, and keeps windows stable and efficient. An image backup of my original clean install would not be usefull, as by the time I am ready to use it there are probably new versions of all the programs I installed, and new versions of all my drivers, not to mention a dozen or so windows patches that have to be installed. It's just as fast to reinstall from scratch, and lots more stable and reliable. Linux systems are much better set up to be maintained, migrated, and archived, but I don't think that is salient to your question. Just know that there are a LOT of hidden costs of ownership created by bad decisions at Microsoft, and you just found one of the biggies. Bill "ranting"... | ||
| Reepicheep |
BTW... I don't know any raid solution for laptops. There may be some specialized guberment type black boxes that will plug in a standard laptop drive bay and have internal raid hardware, but they probably don't store much data, cost a gazillion dollars, and would be near impossible to find. You would be much better off building a home "docking" type approach (either directly to the laptop, or via a network to a server) with an automated background process to backup data every evening. Or just keep your "created" data (C:/My Documents) backed up and taking a bullet once every 6 to 18 months. You can usually rebuild a system completely in less then a day, and it usually ends up better then the last system in may regards. This has always been a problem, but the capability of removable backup media has lagged WAAAAYYYY behind the capacity of the "average" hard drive. You can buy an 80 gig desktop drive for $90 now, but you still need a stack of tapes or DVD-R's to back the whole thing up, and CDR's would be virtually impossible (90+ media changes, 5 of which will probably come out unreadable?). Bill "stop me before I rant again" | ||
| Josh |
Ok I didn't read all of that, but using Norton Ghost you can restore just a few files from an image via the GhostExplorer. You cannot (to my knowledge) add or update files in an image tho. Here's how we do laptops: Make sure the network controller in the laptop is known (you need to have a Ghost boot disk created for each Network card) Boot the laptop with the ghost boot disk. Start "Ghost Server" on the desktop machine. Tell the Ghost Server to start a session, "dump from laptop" and give the image a file name. Tell it to accept clients On the laptop, select server/unicast and insert the session name and server IP. It will ask which partition to image, then ask whether you want compression, then start imaging. When finished, on the server you'll have a file (size approx equal to the used space on the hard drive imaged) that is an exact image of the laptop drive. Imaging takes about 10min/Gig depending on your machine speeds and network speed. Reghosting the laptop is basically the same thing in reverse. It's easier if you have a separate drive that can be seen from DOS as the same ghost boot diskette can create the image file on another drive in much less time. We have base images for rolling out new machines, we Ghost before doing upgrades of servers, we Ghost to move a server to new hardware, reconfigure a RAID etc. 'course I also have 4.5 Terabytes of data storage avail Josh | ||
| Josh |
Oh, you can also easy change disk sizes using Ghost, larger or smaller. As long as the new drive is larger than the amount of data you had on the old one you're good-to-go. Josh | ||
| Blake |
I do not run on a network. Just a standalone notebook PC with an external HDD. Funny you mention TAR, I'm actually familiar with that from my FEM/FEA stress analysis work station days running SDRC IDEAS on an IBM RS6000 with XWindows (Unix). I'm still confused as to the *best* solution for my laptop though. Probably just using the external HDD to backup my files. I was hoping to find a special connector/ribbon cable that would allow me to connect two HDD's in master/slave configuration, just I can in my desktop machine (a ribbon cable with multiple HDD connectors). Winzip along with my external HDD will probably do everything I need. I know it will do intelligent backups. | ||
| Leeaw |
Blake, I would still image your laptop drive with all the programs installed, so in case your laptop dies again, you can just restore the image and not have to go from scratch again. | ||
| Josh |
Network (prices per BestBuy): 10/100 NIC for Laptop (if not built-in) $30. 10/100 NIC for Desktop(if not built-in) $15 Crossover cable $21 (note should be much cheaper at a generic computer store) Share printers, drive space and Internet access. How 'bout external CDRW or DVD-R? If you want up and running as fast as possible after a HD crash, use Ghost. If you want to back up your data as cheap as possible, Winzip to your external firewire HD setup. Depending on the external HD you might buy additional cheap IDE drives to swap into the firwire case. | ||
| Reepicheep |
Blake... What Josh said, home networks are fast, flexible, and cheap. I will be back in Arlington in a couple weeks, and will be happy to swing buy when I am done with the gig and before I fly back out and set you up. I assume you have high speed access. We can get a wireless access point / firewall / hub / dhcp server/ NAT translator for between $120 and $180 depending on local specials. We can then add a wireless node to your laptop for $80 or so, and just for good measure throw in a $35 100/t card (if your laptop does not have it built in already) for those really big transfers. You would be amazed at the speed you can move data across a 100/t network. You will then have protected and flexible access for as many home machines as you care to set up, both wireless and wired depending on local goals and constraints, and excellent security. I should be able to get everything up, working, and fully audited in about 4 hours worst case, so long as your machines are otherwise running well. You could also get a cheapo $500 desktop, stuff it to the gills with 3 80 meg hard drives (about $90 each), and throw your printer and a CDRW on it to be shared with everyone in the house. A great big shared "data sink". Bill "who does computers like Blake does math" |
