Hard Disk Drive (HDD):
Playing Dead
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Now I’ve seen everything. Two weeks ago one of our users got a blue screen on his laptop and came running to get me. When I got to his computer I rebooted and found the “C” drive not recognized; nothing was accessible. Knowing the hard-drive was shot; I quickly gave him a replacement desktop, took the laptop and swapped out the drive for a new one. The next day I started reloading the OS and apps he’d need and began to examine the dead drive.
After having a conversation with the user he realized that there was data on the drive that was extremely important. So, I used a USB to IDE/ATA & SATA cable to see if I could mount the drive on my own laptop. My Windows XP machine began to install the hardware but came to an abrupt halt. It fell short of mounting so I tried the same thing on three other computers; still no success. I finally had to break the news to the user that the data was most likely irretrievable.
Knowing the importance of this data to the user I started banging around many of the outrageous HDD story’s that I’ve heard with another tech. Figuring that the drive was toast, and having nothing more to lose, we decided on two possible solutions; banging it, which didn’t work, and placing it in a freezer for about an hour which also failed to get the drive going. Finally, I asked my boss who heads the IT department if he had any ideas; all he said was place the drive aside for two weeks and try mounting it then. He had some strange experience with hard drives coming to life after letting them sit for two weeks.
Two weeks to the day of its death, I tried mounting it to my laptop the exact same way I did two weeks before and presto. I heard the drive kick up speed and it began to mount. Immediately after the OS recognized the drive I didn’t waste any time and pulled the data off to my desktop. That totally rocks; I then pushed all the data from my laptop right to the user’s repaired computer over the network.
The moral of the story: Some things aren’t meant to be understood, just put to practice. There were many high-fives and cheers that day, and from what I can tell, sometimes it’s best to do nothing when you’re faced with a problem. You never know; things just might work out anyway.
Monday, August 6, 2007 |
No comments:
Post a Comment