My hard drive crashed :(

[XPikachu]

Guess what, my one of my 4 HDD's crashed.

It's making this grinding noise when it powers up, then no sound.

After a few seconds it starts making another grinding noise like something is touching the platter. It has NEVER been dropped or mishandled

Any ideas?

Shows up in the BIOS but not the OS.

I took out the HDD and placed it onto anouther MB and booted the UBD4W.

Then I ran some diagnostics software, but it did not detect the drive at all.

Drive is a WD30EZRS SATAIII 3TB and was part of a RAID 0 array

Thanks!

 

[dale]

Your HDD is probably dead. If you want the data, best to get the recovery experts working on it ASAP. (RAID 0... Ouch. )

 

[XPikachu]

(RAID 0... Ouch. )

That hurt alright!

The funny thing is, is that I had a felling that this was going to happen.

I have all my Pokemon games and movies and all the seasons that was ever made. So I will take it to the Computer FIXIT shop tomorrow.

Thanks for the help. The next reply I make here will be what the guy says.

 

[dale]

Good luck! Hope you get the data back.

 

[_michaelm]

Hopefully you haven't already gone to get it fixed - because I can strongly recommend 'Spinrite' (available at grc.com) I won't go into all the times I've saved disks for family and friends but needless to say it is a very valuable investment ($89 for life).

It boots from cd using a version of FreeDOS and therefore should detect your drive (since your bios does). You'll want run-level 2 for disk recovery, and unlike any other disk recovery tools which have frankly inferior capability at disk recovery (because they mostly work at the filesystem level - which by the time you want to do recovery is toast), spinrite works at the hardware disk sector level and therefore if the bios can see the disk, then it will run, and it will recover your drive (at least enough to allow you to mount it as a slave drive and get the data off - even if it doesn't fix everything).

Hope you get it all sorted, good luck.

 

[*= WildCat =*]

Recovery needs to be done ASAP .... yeah - (RAID 0... Ouch. )

 

[BK_123]

I really don't get raids, I have seen a lot of discussions about raids and I am not even going to try it..

 

[*= WildCat =*]

If the data is important, then yes I would say a raid would be nice. It would be a real time backup. I suggest a Raid 5. Here is a good explanation of the different raid setups >

RAID - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

With a raid 5 you will not have as much HDD space, but if one of your drives dies, the raid will continue to run. Then you can replace the raid and it will rebuild itself.

 

[dale]

Hopefully you haven't already gone to get it fixed - because I can strongly recommend 'Spinrite' (available at grc.com) I won't go into all the times I've saved disks for family and friends but needless to say it is a very valuable investment ($89 for life).

For RAID 0, unless he gets full recovery, there is no telling of the outcome. (Actually, there is, but let's not be too pessimistic.)

This is not a criticism for SpinRite. This is about RAID 0, striping with no redundancy.

I still recommend sending the failed HDD to recovery experts. Be sure to note that RAID 0 was used.

 

[_michaelm]

I agree in principle, although it does depend on whether the raid was hardware or software controlled, but either way - if the disk is recovered with spinrite then I don't see a technical reason why the raid would fail to recognise the disk correctly when it is reintroduced into the array.

My real point was it is probably worth a go with $89 of software which you can use forever more - than going straight to experts who could charge up to 10x that depending on what is involved (and how important the data is).