[plug] Help needed ...

[William Kenworthy]

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). 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.
> Another odd thing, try waiting a little while with the drive not plugged 
> in at all. Recently hard a motherboard chuck a wobbly for a week or two, 
> thought it was the drive, took the drive out and put it in another 
> computer and everything was fine. 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