Am I the unluckiest guy in the world or....

[mesarectifier]

Okay this is getting too stupid to be a coincidence or just bad luck.

As some of you may know, I lost a 200gb hard disk that was working absolutely normally, in fact BETTER than normally, it was working very well, up until 2 days ago, when all of a sudden as if by magic it takes a long walk off a short peir.

Well thanks to another thread I have a few avenues of data-recovery to explore over the coming days, which hopefully will be fruitful.

But the cherry on top of this peice of s**t came in the last 10 minutes, when my 120gb drive before my very eyes stopped working.

I was copying some files over to my laptop over my network, a task which I perform daily, that I need over the weekend when I am going away. I start copying a 500mb folder and decide to go and check on the computer (not because anything's wrong, but I hadn't checked it in a while so I thought, hey, why not). I sit at the computer and suddenly a 'delayed write fail' pops up. Great. So I check in My Computer and sure enough, the drive is gone. I return to my PowerBook and sure enough, the copy has failed.

Off with the machine, into diagnostic mode. I tried a few things for about 15 minutes or so but to no avail. It won't even spin up.

Please excuse my language (as I'm ever so slightly ticked off right now) but how the f**k do two perfectly healthy drives die within 48 hours of each other in the same house? My anti-virus is all up to date, I barely use the internet on either so I'm as close to certain as is possible that it's not a virus or malware or whatever.

What the hell is going on? Is it the power supply to my house? I can't think of anything else. Please help me out, while this stuff wasn't exactly 'mission critical' I'd very much like to find out what in the name of all that's holy has taken 320gb of my data in the last 2 days.

 

[mesarectifier]

I had the machine back on between now and the time I write this.

Suddenly the 200gb drive gets a delayed write fail and dissappears from My Computer. I don't have the time or inclination to do any diagnostics on it right now, but I'm getting seriously concerned for the rest of my data.

I've switched off the machine and unplugged the PSU, and I'm going to leave it like that over the next two nights while I'm away. When I come back I hope to see some change, but please drop ANY ideas you have right now, as this is getting pretty serious.

 

[sailer]

Two things pop into my head.

First, a power supply is giving too much power and is roasting the hard drives. Check the psu for its power outputs compared to the specs that its supposed to put out.

Second is the motherboard is failing and allowing too much current through, causing the hard drives to over heat and fail.

The house power from the wall socket usually either causes a crash from too little power, or it burns out the psu from too much. At least that has been my experience. Its this type of erratic house power problem that caused me to invest in a ups.

 

[celewign]

Wow.

If I were you, I'd try to kill myself, but the gun/knife probably wouldn't work for you.

-cm

 

[desolationw]

Sounds like a dodgy PSU. Were both failed hdd's running off the same psu? (couldn't work out from long comment)

 

[tool_462]

Probably thought of this first...but you didn't happen to lose your intake fan blowing over the HDD bays or anything right? I doubt it, but sometimes the simple things sneak under the radar.

I would go with either bad mobo or bad PSU also.

 

[piratepast40]

I had something similar happen last January. Ended up frying both memory sticks and one hard drive. Luckily, both Kingston and Seagate honored their warranties so I wasn't out the money but did lose my data and went through quite a frustrating experience trying to figure out what happened. I've since invested in a regulated power supply and tightened the stock voltage and frequency setpoints. The log for power supply has shown 16 power drops in the last 11 months.
I've been told that many unexplained problems can be atributed to "dirty power".

For data recovery, you may have tried the "hard drive in the freezer" trick. Some say it's at least worth a try when you're pulling your hair out from frustration. My personel favorite is this one:

Place the hard drive on a flat surface in the center of the room and surround it with lit candles and incense. Turn off the lights and remove all your clothes. Wearing only face paint and chicken feathers, begin a dance around the drive and recite as many incantations as possible. if you know any voodoo stuff, now is the time to use it - if you don't know any - just make it up. Keep up the "naked chicken dance" as long as possible in hopes the drive will respond. Several notes on this one: consumption of alcohol prior to the event is highly recommended as is closing the drapes unless you want to find the neighbors either in hysterics or absolute shock!

 

[mesarectifier]

Okay, thanks for all the suggestions guys.

All of these suggestions about PSU problems would explain it I'm sure, except for the fact that it's happened now 3 times on 2 different computers. Simultaneous PSU failure? I don't know.

As it happens, the board in the first system is beginning to consume itself (not enough free resources for a NIC, apparently!) so I was just blaming that.

And if any of you were going to say 'cooling' - the computer is in a deliberately cold room, and are all fan-cooled (none of which had failed), and there's air between the disks on all sides.

 

[piratepast40]

Okay, thanks for all the suggestions guys.

All of these suggestions about PSU problems would explain it I'm sure, except for the fact that it's happened now 3 times on 2 different computers. Simultaneous PSU failure? I don't know.

There's certainly the chance of a coincidence, especially if the drives were similar in age and amount of use. But you should definately look at a good regulated UPS. The battery backup portion is nice but after seeing mine log frequency and voltage fluctuations as well as power spikes, I'm sold on cleaning up the incoming power. I'm not talking about power strips with surge protection against lightning strikes, rather an actual regulated power supplies with battery backup. I'm no expert on electronics and fluctuating voltages and frequency but from what I'm told, those fluctuations are the number 1 cause of component degredation and spurrious problems.

Another recommendation for data recovery. You could buy an identical hard drive and replace the controller from the bad drive with the controller from the new drive and see if that gets it running. If it doesn't do the trick, you've still got a new drive.

After you're up and running, you might want to check out your memory modules to see if they're still working without errors.

Just trying to pass along my experience with what seems to be a similar problem. I know how frustrating it can be.

 

[three0duster]

Well if it is different computers, are they in the ssame house/office? Possible power sags or spikes eating the computer HDDs? or bad luck is still a possibility.

 

[Doughbuy]

Ewwww... you're computer hates you, it really hates you...

I don't know if you're HDD's are really dead. I want to say they're fine. This is the good thing about an external enclosure, it's a easy way to test HDD's to see if they're still good or not instead of plugging and unplugging things from a computer. I say hold off until the enclosure comes, and then start sticking the HDD's in there and see what happens.

Don't know if its a PSU issue, rarely see PSU's burn out HDD's, usually ram would go since it's more sensitive to voltage. HDD's are fairly hardy in that respect. And I don't think the drives just up and failed on you. What make/model are they?

I might want to say it's a mobo issue with the computer... were the drives on the same IDE cable? Anyways, if the drive's still work, just not on that system, we can assume it's the system itself. If the drive's are really gone... then it might be PSU since 3 drives dieing in a short amount of time is definitly not a coincidence...