Re: Offline

The data surface is probably fine, but the heads won't mobilise to read it. It spins up OK.

The data has intrinsic value, but not >£500 which is what it will cost me to have it recovered commercially. (I did have a backup, but the backup device died at the same time as the drive... doh.) So I was vaguely hoping if somebody has the right skills / equipment they may do it for beer money...

Cheers, David

What's the backup device? Someone may have a similar device with which to do the recovery (presuming it is a removable media device).

Tim Hobbs

'58 Series 2 '77 101FC Ambulance '95 Discovery V8i

If you have another drive of the same type, you could try swapping the controller card. This isn't as hard as it sounds and doesn't take too much fiddling.

I generally find that the people who respond least well to sage advice about backup strategies are those with their head in their hands and a broken HDD on the desk! ;-)

There was the famous occasion when a client rang to tell us they had a dead server. "Do you have a backup?" we asked. "Oh yes, we've still got that tape you left us when you set the server up".

It's hard being the messenger sometimes...

Tim Hobbs

'58 Series 2 '77 101FC Ambulance '95 Discovery V8i

I think it's something mechanical with the head, but I'll give it a try, if I can find another 9GB Quantum SCSI drive.

DVD-RAM. The media is the type in the square cartridge, with 2.6GB per side. It was written on a Panasonic L101 in UDF.

Any offers gratefully received!

David.

You may be screwed, then, I'm afraid. This would be somewhat unusual though and I wouldn't rule out the controller card.

I have a few kicking around somewhere (you did say scsi didn't you?).

If you get to the stage of binning it, probably best to pop it in the post to me and I'll have a quick neb if I get a moment. No guarantees mind, but better than the dustcart, and I do owe you one for the Ericsson battery :-)

On or around Fri, 15 Aug 2003 12:47:26 +0100, Tim Hobbs enlightened us thusly:

which reminds me, must get some CDs that my CD drive is prepared to write to. Got a silly message about not being able to do fixation - it is possible that the drive is broken, but if so it did it co-incidentally with the purchase of a box of cheap Maxell CDs.

In the normal run of things, I back up user data to CD every few weeks.

There's a quick and useful guide at

Thanks Martyn, I may take you up on that!

I'm now back from the dead with a new PC, by the way.

David.

And a new backup and (tested) restore strategy? :-)

Well, I'm working on that!

Is there anything anybody would recommend in either hardware or software apart from CD-R? Anybody offer backup as a managed service to home users?

On or around Wed, 20 Aug 2003 07:44:50 +0100, "David French" enlightened us thusly:

depends on a) how important the data is and b) how much data.

I reckon CD-R has to be a good bet for small-ish quantities of data - trouble is, each CD only holds about 650MB so if you have a lot of data, you'll be pratting about with CDs too much. But the media is reasonably stable, and the drives readily available, so if a drive goes down it's no problem.

For larger amounts of data, really, a tape streamer has to be the most likely option, but you have to make sure that it's not going to become obsolete too quickly - I think the ones that use the same tapes as the video-8 cameras ought ot be a good bet... Mind, the next thing is DVD-ROM, isn't it.

your other option is of course a mirror hard drive, which isn't silly given the stupidly cheap price of same these days (compared to what it used to be

- I can remember being amazed that you could buy a 540MB drive for about 109 quid, not all that long ago) - about the only thing to say about that is don't use 2 drives of the same make/model/age, or sod's law will dictate that they fail simultaneously too.

I'll add my vote for ghost, however, a little forethought can save a lot of hassle.

One strategy is to have two hard drives. Keep your programs on one and your data on the other. If you then need to roll back to a previous windoze install the data will not be affected. Also look at getting into a ritual of backing up. Rather like collecting your email each morning. Make it something you 'do' without thinking about it.

A rather cruel way to test a backup:

Go into the office early one morning and swap the hard drive on one of the machines for a new, unformatted blank one. See how long it takes whoever is responsible to restore the information. If they can't, you can put the original drive back in, and sack the person responsible for doing the backup.

A standard 'rule of thumb' is that if a machine is damaged or stolen and it takes you longer than 30 minutes to get back to where you were before, somebody isn't doing their job properly.

If the same happens at home, blame the dog and go to the pub.

I think I'd better say how good ghost is too, seeing as how it saved the day here this morning.

At about 21:15 last night something happend to the disk in our email server (PC running Potato). I came in this morning to loads of errors about seek failures and such like. I grabbed the ghost CD and quickly copied the hard drive to a good one and booted it to see what would happen.

Most of the setup was copied across and all I had to do was spend 30 minutes with apt as it seemed to have forgotten about some packages that were installed.

Fantastic!

On or around 21 Aug 2003 14:07:16 GMT, Simon Barr enlightened us thusly:

do you have to get it from bleedin' Symantec?

Don't get me started on Symantec... biggest virus outbreak ever and they can't even reply to my emails asking if they will let me download the software I already own...

Or our distributed RAID with WAN mirror image - all run under GLP and/or open source, of course. Does need a fairly good WAN link, though ;-)

Laptops are a s0d - as you may only dock them once a week. I'd go for a USB2 external HDD unit (50 quid from Maplin) and any of the freely available mirror utils for that. Or ghost, of course ;-)

On or around Thu, 21 Aug 2003 21:13:58 +0100, "David French" enlightened us thusly:

I eschew them after a complete failure to communicate with me on the subject of Norton AV registration. Lost the licence files after having to format C:, found the bit of paper on which I'd printed out the serial numbers etc. like it told you to in the installation, failed to re-licence it on their website - got onto Digital River (which their website said was the thing to do), DR at least gave a reply saying that it was Symantec's pigeon, Symantec, after several mails, failed to even give an auto-respond that the mail was being processed, nor a relpy. Their loss, I now use F-prot antivirus instead, and pay their licence fees (25 bucks a year, or somesuch, for single user) - seems to work fine - any time I try it on a known virussed email, it manages to detect it. updates every 2 days, never had problems with their update server either.