Happy with my new rig, for 10 (ten) minutes.......A few weeks later (update)

[FlyingH]

...then my HDD with all my simstuff started clicking and made a sqeeeking noise! Shut down the pc and removed the faulty drive. Next Q, do you guys have any advice on how to retrieve the data from that drive to another drive (will be an ssd this time, maybe even an NVMe disk) in a safe way? Please give me some hope.

New NVMe 1Tb disk made it into my rig, now I got upgraded with i5 10something, 32Gb mem, 3060 12GB Vram, ASUS B 560Plus WIFI mb and I´m reinstalling all my games, updating all my settings (I found them in a backup folder deep down in a cavity in one of my old discs). As the weather here in northern Sweden will be awful for the next 3 days, I can´t be outside building the new chicks house, I have to commit myself to restoring everything that was lost with the chrash of the 13 years old disc! Luckily I have all the periferal programs DLed in another disc so I can fairly easilly recreate my setup as it was AND do changes to suit me better. Now I´m a happy simmer again!

 

Edited September 23, 2021 by FlyingH
Adding content

[Rjel]

Is the drive completely unusable? There are companies who advertise data recovery. No idea to the cost.

[AEthelraedUnraed]

11 minutes ago, Rjel said:

Is the drive completely unusable? There are companies who advertise data recovery. No idea to the cost.

€1000 is a realistic estimate.

 

Indeed, check to what extent the drive is indeed broken. Boot with linux, run fsck.

[Beebop]

A new computer HDD went bad right after you started it up?  Is this an older drive that is in a rig that you recently upgraded?

 

You will need a thumb drive or external drive with enough space to hold the data you want to save. 

Plug in the thumb or external drive via a USB connection.

Assuming the "bad" drive still works, open the drive in Explorer and copy it to the thumb drive/external drive.

Then when you install the new drive you can copy it off the thumb drive onto the new drive.

 

You may need to go to a "professional".  If possible find a 'Mom & Pop'* shop and talk with them and if you feel comfortable have them do it.  Or if you have a "computer geek" friend you trust see if they can do it.

Locally (PDX Pacific NW USA) recovery costs from data recovery shops starts around $200.  A *M&P store might be a little less.

 

You could purchase software that can recover data from bad drives but the cost might be prohibitive and the level of experience needed to operate it may be outside your comfort level.  Basic recovery tool software prices run from ~$30 to ~$100.  Your would need to read a lot of reviews then take them with a grain of salt IMO.

 

HTH

Edited September 14, 2021 by Beebop

[AEthelraedUnraed]

4 minutes ago, Beebop said:

Locally (PDX Pacific NW USA) recovery costs from data recovery shops starts around $200.  A *M&P store might be a little less.

Unless USA prices are significantly lower than in the Netherlands, I think that's an *extremely* low estimate. Depending on if the disk is broken or not. But if the disk is not broken, there's no reason to go to a data recovery shop.

 

Bottom line: data recovery is very expensive. Try to boot up your HDD, using fsck or chkdsk if needed. But given that your HDD failed 10min after you installed it in a new PC, please double-check that there's nothing wrong with your hardware setup that could have caused this! If you're not sure, use an external SATA->USB controller.

[TheWarsimmer]

There is software out there that can recover data off a hard-drive- much of it for free, and it works decently. Your best bet is to run windows off of a hard drive that works, download some software, and plug your corrupted hard-drive into an external holder or internal bay and run the software. I've done it before and it works. Look on youtube for specifics. It can be done.

[76IAP-Black]

Buy a HDD Dock, put it in and let it clone the HDD to a new one, had the same issue...

It will cost you 24€ for the Dock thats it and the new HDD

whoever said 1000€ 

[IckyATLAS]

If the HDD is completely broken, let's hope the recording heads which normally fly over the disk have not crashed onto the disk and damaged the surface. Clicking noise is not good because the only fast moving with strong accelerations are the recording head moving mechanism.

For data recovery if your platters surface is ok, then yes you can recover the data that has been recorded on disk. Even data that you deleted because the deletion is only for the pointer tables but the data is not erased, and at worst it will be overwritten. If you have disk with large cache memory this can also have an effect depending when and how the whole thing crashed. Data recovery professionals can do miracles but your data must be worth the cost. And yes it can cost in the many thousands Euros or Dollars up to tens of thousands. 

 

Now a silly question here which we know the answer but just for those reading. When you transferred the disk from the previous PC to the new one which is always a risky action, you made no backup? After all these years where I see regularly dramatic data loss situations, backuping is still not the natural action of every PC owner.

And even having two disks in the same PC and just copying some of the most important files from one to the other so that if one disks goes down the other is still there is pretty straightforward to implement. The advantage of the internal backup is that it can be extremely fast. On recent machines with NVMe SSD transfer rates between the two can reach 1 GB/SEC.  Then there is the second level which is an external backup, always slower but I can have about 300 MB/SEC.

 

How old is your HDD. After five years of use it is good practice to change anyway and avoid the risk of a crash. Disk can last 7, 8 years or more but the crash probability level increases a lot. I found that in intensive use three years is ok in medium use five years is ok and one should not go above that if possible. This is for HDDs. 

I had HDD crashes twice in my lifetime but because I backup on two units the other HDD was ok and so no problem.

 

I have no good answer for SSD lifetimes. All my data is now stored exclusively on SSD and I do not have any more HDDs. Same here one additional SSD I call internal Archive and two external SSD which are full backup of the whole machine. I do a PC internal backup for data that has changed a lot and that I consider critical, between two complete backups on external SSD's. 

 

I know some will argue about the financial issue but again the question is how much you value your data. This is the price for total tranquility and mental relaxation.

 

[J2_Steve]

Sounds to me like there is a mechanical failure in the HDD. The disk will need to be able to spin freely to recover the data, doesn't matter where it is plugged into. If it wont work in the pc it wont work in a caddy. If it is a mechanical failure a data recovery will be able to get it back. But as AEthelraedUnraed said recovery is expensive. And how much can be saved will be down to whether the disk has been damaged inside the casing. Not worth the money IMO

I had a disk failure a few years ago. in a perverse way I quite enjoyed hitting the reset button and starting fresh 

[Jaws2002]

I had that issue as well. I used Recuva software to get most of my stuff back.

Edited September 15, 2021 by Jaws2002

[FlyingH]

@IckyATLAS,well man my drive is manufactured 2008! Never thought of it getting old (I´m 70 and running smoothly?). I didn´t move the discs into a new rig, I replaced the internals, mobo, grafic card, memory and cooling devices in the case I have. What worries me is the ticking an squeeking sound from that drive. I understand that using a professional recovery firm is out of the question, the data isn´t wort that much but if a cheeper alternative isn´t working I´ll go through the hazzle of building my sims from scratch. And of course I didn´t have backup for many of the items on that disc! The worst part will be redoing all the hotas settings in the games. I have a backup of the TARGET scripts but implanting them into the sims takes a good amount of time! That will have to wait as I have to build a chicken house and install a heatpump before winter (that´s only a few weeks away here in the north of Sweden.)

@Jaws2002I think I´ll try recuva.

Thank you all for your answers to my dilemma. Sometimes I´ll be back flying!

Edited September 15, 2021 by FlyingH

[cardboard_killer]

The only time I've lost computers was when the HD died, and it's happened three times. So, I plan on having a new hard drive every three to five years, whether I replace everything else or not. And, back up, back up, back up. Still, it's a PITA to reinstall everything.

[AEthelraedUnraed]

On 9/15/2021 at 11:14 PM, FlyingH said:

well man my drive is manufactured 2008! Never thought of it getting old

That's extremely old for a hard drive, no wonder it broke down. HDDs age *much* faster when they're on and spinning than when not, but even with occasional use I wouldn't trust any harddrive older than 10 years.

 

The good news is that your new storage will be much faster, especially since you've already said you're going for an SSD. This is actually one of the biggest upgrades you can do on an old system, and will instantly make your computer a lot faster. I wouldn't be surprised if the time required to boot your PC goes from several minutes to 10 or 20 seconds.

 

Regarding what to do next, since you said you switched off your drive rather than waited until it failed, it might still work. I suggest you first buy a new SSD, disconnect the HDD and put in the SSD. Then install Windows on the SSD, turn off the PC, put the HDD in a spare SATA slot, boot up your PC and hope it still works! If all goes well, you should see two drives under This PC in the Windows File Explorer. Copy everything from your old HDD to the SSD, and hope for the best.

Edited September 17, 2021 by AEthelraedUnraed