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At 07:28 AM 1/13/00 , MarketMayvin@xxxxxxx wrote:
>Hello out there
> I need a second opinion on my dead hard drive. I was always under the
>impression that even if you have a hard drive failure, there would be some
>software out there to extract all the valuable documents stuck inside. I was
>told yesterday that my hard drive is deader than a dead nail. Can this be?
>How is it possible? Can someone out there tell me if it is possible to revive
>a really dead hard drive? It was a western bell. Aren't they one of the best
>hard drive makers? I need some help for my current status and I think I need
>a job because I don't know even where to start to get everything replaced if
>I can even remember what was in there.
Sorry to say that hard drives fail all the time. Depending on the failure
mode, the data may or may not be recoverable. There are some services
around that MAY be able to extract the data from a failed drive; you'll
have to hunt to find one. And there's certainly no guarantee they'll be
successful.
All drives have a specification known as the MTBF (Mean Time Between
Failures). From the Seagate web site, I have taken the following
explanation from a Seagate technician about their Barracuda 4 drive:
"The drive has a useful service life of 5 years. It's MTBF is 800,000 hours.
"This would mean that if we were tracking a base of 800,000 drives, we
could expect one failure per hour of operating time. There would be no way
to determine which of those drives would be the failure in any given hour."
A common posting to this list seems to be the subject of data loss. It's
imperative for everyone to know the importance of doing regularly scheduled
backups. Large capacity tape drives have become very inexpensive (OnStream,
for example). Not doing a tape backup is like driving without seat belts.
You may get away with it for a long time, but the price paid can be extreme.
Allan
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