My PC broke down

[Harbinger]

I'm so glad i'm not hooked into the internet at home.

[blows fat cigar puffs...condescendingly laughing]

[Saga Musix]

well, hardware failures certainly don't result from viruses.

[aGIANTpupafish]

ah sam I'm so sorry.

mine's broken too it seems. the light's are on, but no-one's at home...

[Sam_Zen]

At the shop they assured me that the data could be rescued from the hardisk.
To copy this 20 GB to memory sticks appeared to be quite inefficient and expensive.
So I then found a portable harddisk as better medium. 500 Giga for 69 euro, it's amazing.
This is huge, so I will ask the technician, if it's possible to create several partitions on such a thing as well.
I'm used to this kind of survey, having a division between program, work and archive areas.

If this rescue succeeds, I'm quite happy, because I was in the middle of reducing noise from a recording.
From a cassette, with an LP as source, so I already spend quite some hours for it.
Apart from other vital data, like my addressbook for example.

[LPChip]

Sam_Zen, to answer your question, sure. You can partition an external harddrive as easilly as you can partition your normal internal harddrive.

Its even possible to partition an usb stick! Downside of that is that windows will only recognise the first partition, but this limitation is solely applicable to usb sticks. External harddrives can be partitioned as desired without any problems. I have a 1 TB external Hard drive partitioned and its no problem. Did the same to my usb stick for testing purpose, and although it was a bit hard to partition my usbstick, it worked, and the first partition showed up in the explorer as expected. The second didn't though, but that was just a test anyway.

[Sam_Zen]

Yep, today I brought the gear to the shop, and the technician will make 5 partitions and copy the HD on it.

Since I have to get a new studio-pc, this is a good opportunity to re-consider the studio-routing.
Because it appeared to be a mistake to have the pc as the center of the studio.
All instrument sources are coupled to my main mixer, which was connected to the sound input(s) of the pc.
Then the outputs of the pc were connected to the main amplifiers of the studio monitors.
The fact that I can't make any sound in the studio now, because the pc is removed, shows the wrong approach.
So I'll have to reset my studio wiring, to be able to mix and make sound first, even without a pc.

Second opportunity when getting a new pc, is to enhance the sound properties.
So far the recent years, I did all the work on a relatively slow set (620 Mhz) with little RAM.
I don't go hunting for some dual-core state of the art machine, but some improvement can be made.
With the external HD I now already have lotsa space, but the new set also must have more RAM on board.
For example in my multitrack mixer I had a max of 7 stereo-tracks, then the record button was disabled.

Third opportunity is my use of multi-channel I/O audio. So far, as a workaround, I used 2 stereo soundcards for it.
In the meantime prices have gone down, so I'm going to look for an 8 in - 8 out external device.

[Waxhead]

There is many recovery companies around the world. My best bet will be IBAS (a Norwegian company) and they have a 24/7 hours FREE phone service!

I have never used them myself and they are very expensive but to my best knowledge they the best there is (or was - it's been a few years hehe).

www.ibas.no (norwegian site)
www.ibas.com

Might be worth checking out if you REALLY want your data

[Saga Musix]

If you have a look at the costs of data resucing, a free phone service doesn't count that much anymore...

[LPChip]

There are good technicians all over the world. There are also good technicians here in NL.

The better ones which are more expensive do have the ability to open the harddisc in a suitable environment to restore any mechanical failures in order to get the last data of it.

I also know a few tricks that don't require opening the case, and usually give a 30 minute access window to copy files from the disc.

Its a technique discovered and utilised by russians. You basically deep freeze the harddrive for atleast a few hours. Ofcource pack it well so it doesn't get wet. Due to the fact that its metal, the parts will schrink a little allowing it to work again. But due to warmth generated by the device itself, the metal will expand again, and most likelly will crash again.

My best advice in such cases is to freeze the drive, then attach it to the pc so you have an access window of say... 30 minutes. You open command, execute a dir /b/s >allfiiles.txt and copy the textfile to a location you can work with it thats not on that harddrive. (or include its path: c:\allfiles.txt)

Then disconnect the harddrive again, and put it back in the freezer.

Now use the allfiles.txt to determine the files you want to copy, and edit the allfiles.txt so it contains copy filename newlocation. That way when renaming to .bat or .cmd, you can just execute the script and get everything copied as efficient as possible.

[Sam_Zen]

So far I don't assume that in this case it's a matter of a badly damaged hard disk (IDE).
I opened the case and removed the HD to bring it to the technician of the shop.
I have a collection of HD's with different OS's on it, but when connecting them to the case, the same behaviour occurred :
an endless loop of rebooting. So it's really the hardware or motherboard which has broken down in the first place.

And I don't need to get the exact content of the HD back, I have enough things on it externally archived, I'm just interested in some data I like being recovered for convenience.

[Waxhead]

The company I mentioned actually remove each single platter and scans them in a special scanner, cool toys but very expensive indeed.

When it comes to figuring out hardware problems I would first of all run memtest86+ and then I would try to get some live cd with linux or something. I had big problems with one of my machines (old amd crap) that was crashing randomly. Windows did not report any problems at all but linux on the other hand pumped out a lot of errors (I think it was some interrupt timing mismatch). However I underclocked this machine and now it have been working (more or less hehe) like it should for a few years.

Regarding LPChip's method of "fixing" hard drives. Is this just for hard-drives who have problems with the electronics? (same effect as freeze spray) or is the freezing process supposed to do something with mechanical defects?! (e.g. reduce free play or stuff like that) ?!

[LPChip]

I believe it can work for mechanical problems too.

[KrazyKatz]

Hello fellows, it seems the season, since my P.C just decided to die as well. I'll be offline for a bit too until things are worked out.

[Sam_Zen]

Well, it seems the season indeed...

I would first of all run memtest86+ and then I would try to get some live cd with linux or something.

In the past I was able to test, repair or rescue a lot with "Hiren's bootable disk".
It's a big package with all kinds of tools, system analyzing like Aria, disk tests, partition managers, etc.

[residentgrey]

I will be backing up to me site, along with my external.