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Gazer
03-10-2006, 11:40 PM
Anyone ever heard or had both hard drives go at the same time in the same PC ??? well it happed to me last saturday same time the server went down :( iv lost all of my pictures of the kids growing up all of me files, music, backups and films, which i had backups of the lot on the second drive in there, anyone know what could of done both in at the same time ??

Cheers Gazer.

grantie
04-10-2006, 12:18 AM
I have came across the same thing once a drive that was bad stopped working and the bios wouldnt pick up the working drive up cause the broken one was still on the ide cable. Taking the bad hard drive out helped the other one work. Try them sepereate one at a time on the ide cable.

Basic debugging a broken hard drive is one see if the bios picks it up if it does s.m.a.rt test it. You can put a new drive into a machine and windows wont find it even if its formatted you have to add it.

Hope this helps. If you need more info on smart testing or how to see if the bios picks them up let me know.

to see if windows just isint picking them up automaticly goto start->control pannel->Administrative Tools->Computer Management its under storage disk management in there

Calico
04-10-2006, 12:29 AM
Was just thinking the same thing & that it may have just been the shared controller going down.

Do the drives power up Gaz?...and were you running raid? Cos if you used disk striping (level 0 ) and one drive goes down, then yer fecked :(.

Diablo13
04-10-2006, 12:51 AM
That must be really upsetting gazer because it's personal irreplaceable memories. I saw the same thing happen to 2 Samsung drives in a mates computer once and he was really pi$$ed even though it was just general computer stuff. Anyway he did manage to retrieve his backed up information from the second drive by using Acronis true image. He put a brand new drive formatted with XP in his machine and installed Acronis, (which by the way is a very powerful and useful tool) and then added his "dead" second drive. Now here is where it gets a bit sketchy for me as I did'nt do it, sorry, but he was able to access his drive using a recovery files part of Acronis. I think he had made a backup file of his new drive and then added the files on his second drive as an update. I hope that makes sense because I know he succeeded and would like to help in your case because I have sympathy with the type of data you lost, but unfortunately I am not the technical whizz type. I will try to get more info from him later today and post it, but I do know he has recovered data from other "dead" drives using Acronis. I don't want to teach you to suck eggs m8 but in future maybe you should back up to an external hdd which you keep just for that purpose. A thunderstorm can do untold damage to all components in a machine, so an external would be safer because you don't leave it connected.
I hope it is worth a try for you because professional data recovery firms are ridiculously expensive and charge by the gig of recovered data.

pinkerton
04-10-2006, 02:25 AM
An alternative is to replace with a new drive and install an OS then install one of the faulty drives and run a data recovery program like getdata.

Gazer
04-10-2006, 08:51 AM
Thanks for the replys guys ;)
but i have 3 other PCs in the house which are the kids and my laptop, i have tried both these drives in two of the other PCs already and the first drive which was the main drive on mine just fooks up the kids computer when i connent it just end up with a blank screen and the second drive i can see it in the bios but cant get it to show up as a drive on the PCs, Both are 160 gig ide drives, anyway iam off out to pick a new one up then will try again and run a data recovery program, i will be happy with getting the pictures of the kids off one of them.

and yes i know i should of had a external drive which is now on order, but its the first time iv seen two drives go down at the same time, another lesson learnt for me.

Regards Gazer

nobby
04-10-2006, 09:43 AM
Have you tried using a bootable Linux CD? I've had some success recovering files from broken disks using this method (you'ld also need something like a USB memory stick to move the recovered files onto) and it has the advantage that nothing is written to the disk during the boot (which could, of course, make the situation worse).

callisto11
04-10-2006, 10:12 AM
Poor Gazer, I have every sympathy for you. General data is unimportant, but pictures and movies of your family growing up are irreplaceable.
I have my family stuff stored on an internal second disk, an external HDD and also archived out to decent quailty (Verbatim) DVD media. Dont trust the cheap DVD media, nobody knows how long the data will still be readable for. (By cheap I mean Ritek, CMCMag, Datawrite, Datasafe, Unbranded..)

What make were the HDDS which went faulty, they weren't Maxtor were they ? Maxtor are crap in my and a few other technical ppl I knows' experience.. Stay away from Maxtor. They run very hot and fail a lot.

I can only guess as to what happened to them, but as has been suggested, perhaps it was a fault with your HDD controller ? Or perhaps it was a power surge through your PSU ? Highly unusual to get 2 disks failing at the same time, I've never heard of it before, and I've been in IT for 20 odd years ..

Good luck getting the data back.

Gazer
04-10-2006, 10:35 AM
One was a Samsung 160gig and the other i think was a Hitachi 160gig i know the dates were 2002 and 2003 as i thought they were newer than that, must of been the kids PCs i changed couple of years ago.
anyway i will have a play with them as soon as i get a new drive fitted, and iam now looking at the Buffalo - LinkStation Network Storage Centre to add to my network for added safty.

shavedawookie
07-10-2006, 11:16 PM
I had a PSU blow in my vmware esx box around 2 months ago. 4 of the 5 scsi disks blew up as well, losing me 5 virtual machines and around 3 weeks work! It would be unlikley that the drives failed simultaniously of their own accord though - i would check the disk controller or power supply cabling....

Mike_the_monk
07-10-2006, 11:56 PM
I had one format itself last week, C drive with all the windows data favorites photos i managed to use a recovery program to get most the data back, if u want it let me know

mcfisco
08-10-2006, 09:40 AM
It sounds like you have tried most things without any joy
A trick that will occasionally work is freezing a dead drive for a while & for some reason they can sometimes live again for a while.
Hook it up as a slave & get as much of the data off as possible.

I have actually seen it work once so I know it's not a total myth - I guess you've nothing to lose trying it.