[plug] Help needed - final summary...

[David Dartnall]

On 18/07/10 18:52, William Kenworthy wrote:
> On Sun, 2010-07-18 at 19:21 +1000, Tim White wrote:
>    
>> If what you really need is Lucid, and didn't have much valuable data on
>> it, and you can scrap the data on the drive, then your cheapest option
>> is to take/send the drive back to place of purchase or WD. I'm much
>> better at backing things up now days (and for all really important
>> stuff, I'm using dropbox to automatically store my documents on the
>> cloud, Ubuntu One has a similar thing).
I must look into that, sounds sensible?
>>   But I've lost data from a number
>> of hard drives over the last few years. Some drives just died suddenly
>> without warning. Again, a PCB issue but the cost of recover is just too
>> much.
>> Its not really that hard to get a running system again with all your
>> things installed, it's just a question of how important documents are
>> that are on the drive.
>>      
Yes, to all of you Richard, Scott, Tim, Peter Sheldon and William, it 
was indeed a matter of how important the lost data was.
I'm a 79-year-old, not specifically using my computer for business, and 
have most records of financial matters on a USB key. Similarly a partial 
backup of material relating to production of a weekly Rotary Bulletin 
and some other work was also partly saved on usb storage. So it wasn't 
the end of the world, and a lot of work got me going again. But there 
was a lot of stuff I'll miss, photos etc... (Bet that when I'm gone the 
kids won't miss it tho')

And it wasn't worth $1000 or so, even if we could have readily afforded it.

Most of us assumed that we could get access to the drive, get the 
reinstalled system to at least recognise it. Didn't happen.
I tried the freeze idea, knocked the drive while spinning up etc. 
without success.The WD diagnostics required access to the drive, and all 
in all nothing worked.

I received a polite response from WD's Data Services people offering to 
diagnose without charge ($99 usually) if I sent the drive to them, they 
said that that data recovery  would in the order of $800 to $2400.

WD have given me a "Return Material Authority" to send the drive to them 
for replacement. So that's what I'm doing.

>> . Now that motherboard is working fine
>> too. But if you hear any grinding when you turn the drive on, then you
>> really might just want to send the drive back for a replacement under
>> warranty and just write the data off....
>>
>>
>> Grinding implies hardware failure - this is one method that has worked -
>> sometimes :)
>> http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/01/freeze-your-hard-drive-to-recover-data.html
>>
>> Ive had success with tapping a screwdriver on the spindle when a drive
>> failed to spin up after storage - worked for months afterwards, but I
>> would be ready with some way to get the data off FAST in case whatever
>> you do does work for a short time!
>>
>> A quick google will come up with a number of things to do - it all
>> depends on what sort of failure it is.  However, if its under warranty,
>> and the data loss is not life threatening, write it off to experience
>> and replace it - and next time backup the critical stuff!
>>
>> The real and only answer of course, is ... backups!
>>
>> Billk
>>      
So thanks again to you all for taking the trouble to help, it really is 
appreciated.
Regards
Dave Dartnall