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Click of Death

S

Slugbait

Elite Member
The beginning: (skip to next paragraph if history doesn't matter to you)
The wife's machine was a 24/7 system (for no reason). Six weeks ago, she lost the Internet...I couldn't fix it, so I suggested she start backing up so I could drop an image and rebuild. She didn't do it. A week or so later, it started continuous reboot-checkdisc-reboot, never getting into W2K. I said it was getting worse, but she only continued bitching about it, and used my machine at every opportunity when 'net access was needed. I finally opened the box and found her Northbridge fan and videocard fan were both locked solid. Thinking this was it, I dropped in a card cooler to blow both the Northbridge and videocard...but that didn't help. So I popped the Maxtor hard drive into an external drive unit, and began saving her stuff from the C drive to my system's drive (like her PST, Favorites, etc). The Maxtor seemed fine in the external unit, so I suspected something else in the system must have gone bad.

After saving the stuff from her C drive, I plugged the Maxtor back into her machine and booted with a floppy to drop her Ghost image back to C. But while in Ghost, suddenly the screen went blank...and I then heard a repeated click from the drive. Three-finger didn't bring up the BIOS, so I hit the PSU switch.

I know the drive and the PSU needs to be replaced. Possibly the mobo. But she has a butt-load of files left on the D and E partitions that she is sick about losing.

Present:
I need to know the best/fastest way to back up these files before the drive goes completely fubar. I figure the first step is an hour in the freezer. The second step: pop it back into the external unit, and transfer over USB to my drive? Or connect it directly to the IDE chain of my system? And would it be best to just copy, or should I use TrueImage and grep as much as possible? Would TrueImage even give me the ability to retain this info?

Ideas welcome. Thanks for listening.
 
hook it directly to the IDE if you can, it is faster and it sounds like you need all the speed you can get (providing the drive stays intact enough to transfer at the higher speeds).
 
ide for connection - no need any interface should slow you down at this point

do you know exactly where all the files are on the partitions? remember, you possibly have a very finite amount of time before the drive dies and therefore if you can get to the files and you know where they all are quickl i would think you could grab them faster than trueimage could do a complete image. if the files are all over the place you might get an image faster than looking for all the files, only you know this.

leave a note on the fridge saying "I Told You So" 😀

good luck and let us know how this plays itself out.

you are lucky, i had a click of death on a drive and it was just a single click of death, dead drive just like that 🙁
 
Originally posted by: bob4432
do you know exactly where all the files are on the partitions? remember, you possibly have a very finite amount of time before the drive dies and therefore if you can get to the files and you know where they all are quickl i would think you could grab them faster than trueimage could do a complete image. if the files are all over the place you might get an image faster than looking for all the files, only you know this.

leave a note on the fridge saying "I Told You So" 😀

good luck and let us know how this plays itself out.

you are lucky, i had a click of death on a drive and it was just a single click of death, dead drive just like that 🙁
Click to expand...
I'm not lucky yet...I haven't powered the drive since I heard the click last night, we'll know if it's salvagable soon.

When first informing her of the Click of Death, I told her she needed to map out a plan for grepping her stuff...she said there's no way to do that unless she LOOKS at the contents, and that itself would take time (hours...she's "meticulous"). So no, we don't know where all the files are kept. Three partitions, dozens of folders and countless sub-folders...

It looks like creating an image would be fastest...I just don't know how to transfer the info from the image, or drop the image to a new drive, whatever...I haven't done it before.

I have already done the equivelent of "I told you so"... cuz I told her about "the click" at 1 AM, when I woke her up while crawling into bed.

She could barely sleep after that.

Sounds cruel, but hey, I spent several evenings trying to save that machine...

 
Originally posted by: Slugbait
Originally posted by: bob4432
do you know exactly where all the files are on the partitions? remember, you possibly have a very finite amount of time before the drive dies and therefore if you can get to the files and you know where they all are quickl i would think you could grab them faster than trueimage could do a complete image. if the files are all over the place you might get an image faster than looking for all the files, only you know this.

leave a note on the fridge saying "I Told You So" 😀

good luck and let us know how this plays itself out.

you are lucky, i had a click of death on a drive and it was just a single click of death, dead drive just like that 🙁
Click to expand...
I'm not lucky yet...I haven't powered the drive since I heard the click last night, we'll know if it's salvagable soon.

When first informing her of the Click of Death, I told her she needed to map out a plan for grepping her stuff...she said there's no way to do that unless she LOOKS at the contents, and that itself would take time (hours...she's "meticulous"). So no, we don't know where all the files are kept. Three partitions, dozens of folders and countless sub-folders...

It looks like creating an image would be fastest...I just don't know how to transfer the info from the image, or drop the image to a new drive, whatever...I haven't done it before.

I have already done the equivelent of "I told you so"... cuz I told her about "the click" at 1 AM, when I woke her up while crawling into bed.

She could barely sleep after that.

Sounds cruel, but hey, I spent several evenings trying to save that machine...
Click to expand...

what version of acronis trueimage do you have? do you have enough space on other hdds in the machine this injured hdd is going for a complete image, as in all 3 partitions?
 
I don't know that I would want these files on my new installation because they may be compromised and might screw up you new install also !!!
 
Heh. I clicked on this thread thinking it was going to be about zip drives. 😛

P.S. Sometimes when I have done file copies in situations like yours, I did small chunks at a time. The drive never would survive a 10 GB transfer, but would usually transfer 500 MB at a time just fine.

Luck? Heat? I dunno. Just FYI.
 
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