I never thought it could happen to me. Sure, I’d heard stories about it happening to others, and some of the stories were pretty bad. And I knew all the risks, so I guess it was my own fault. Still, we tend to think “Oh, that’ll happen to the other guy, but not me”. Well, it happened to me and it could just as easily happen to you if you don’t take precautions.
My hard drive pooched last week!
It was an external drive (I’ll use the past tense because it’s about to become catapult fodder, or perhaps a trebuchet). I was going to transfer all the video files that I had so diligently edited from the external drive to the big hard drive on the shiny brand new PowerMac at the school. I attached the external drive and it would not mount. I tried restarting the drive and it would not mount. I tried restarting the computer and it would not mount. I tried restarting the computer then the drive and it would not mount. I tried … I guess by now you get the idea.
Suffice to say I tried everything and it would not mount. Many of the words that are not said in front of my children came out of my mouth.
The next day, I had one of the tech guys from the school division stop by to check things out. He tried all the things that I had tried, and a few more. Alas, his luck was no better than mine. More bad words.
Today, I took the drive to the tech guys at the university. The starting price was $132, and that was just to hook it up and check if anything was salvageable. If there were any files, their software (Disk Warrior, I think) would chug away at it for sometime between a day and a week, with no guarantees about what would be recovered. I was financing this myself, so the thought of spending a few hundred bucks and possibly ending up with zilch was not appealing. As a last resort, I will try the [freezer trick](http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/thread9069.html), but I’m not putting any money on it coming through for me.
So – apparently I will be spending the Easter break partly with my family, and partly with my computer re-editing a whole bunch of video The original video is intact in my super secure archiving facility (my desk drawer), so I don’t have to re-shoot everything. I have a brand new $250 GB external drive and a fresh copy of Final Cut Express (which I wished I had during the first edit since my needs had far surpassed the capabilities of iMovie).
I take comfort in these words of wisdom:
> It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we’ve got a full tank of gas,
> half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses.
>
> Hit it.
3 Comments
Have faith, Rob. I’ve done some of my best work under that kind of pressure. And just think how much better it’s going to be with you working Final Cut Express.
By the way, what kind of drive was it and what did you replace it with?
Give Spin Write a try, it is supposed to work miracles for disk recovery. I use it for drive maintenance.
http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
Cheers,
Rob Keys
Heather – thanks for words of encouragement. Final Cut Express was indeed a pleasure to work with.
Rob – I am familiar with Spin Write (I’m a big fan of Steve Gibson’s Security Now podcasts with Leo LaPorte). I went with the brute force approach to get this project done, but I am certainly going to look into Spin Write and some other tools for periodic drive maintenance in the future. Thanks for the recommendation.
3 Trackbacks/Pingbacks
[...] Despite earlier setbacks, I have almost completely finished the project! My wife found a couple of things to quickly fix up in one video segment and in the DVD menu. Once I get those finished up, I’ll be sending it in. [...]
[...] for the final product, I’m extremely unhappy. I’m sure that a big part of that is the hard drive pooched during the editing of the videos. I’m also unhappy because I don’t think I created the [...]
[...] to manage. Hopefully this will make backups part of all Mac users lives. Backups are important – I have learned that the hard way! I haven’t ordered my copy yet. I’m waiting to see if it crashes Alec’s dual quad [...]
Post a Comment