um have anybody experienced a situation where a hard-drive is good one day and disappears the next, without so match as an i/o error to indicate that something might be wrong, I was actually working with the stuff on it the day before and got absolutely no warning :? , bios just says "non detected" or something like that …weird :?
If you didn't touch any of the connections its strange that it would just disappear… Hard drives do stop working but only after like 10 years or something. Maybe you had a virus?
10 years? having server drives at home?
average lifetime for modern drives is around 4 years.
I have hard drives from many years ago that still work. But its these hard drives that are usually to break first…
First: I'm moving this to the hardware section.
Second: This sounds to me like there's a problem with the disk's controller. The normal 'lifespan' that Empire and Momoko speak of is based on non-freak occurrences and you can usually hear it in the drive's operation some time before it actually fails, regardless of 4 vs 10 years.
I bought a bulk of 4 drives some years back that were the exact same model raided together which all worked fine for a week. One day the stripe failed to boot and upon inspection there was one drive that had simply stopped functioning. Plugging in power and/or data had zero effect, it just never spooled up again. I won't mention names but the company initials were WD. (note, I've since had drives from them that have performed admirably)
sbook said:
First: I'm moving this to the hardware section.
Second: This sounds to me like there's a problem with the disk's controller. The normal 'lifespan' that Empire and Momoko speak of is based on non-freak occurrences and you can usually hear it in the drive's operation some time before it actually fails, regardless of 4 vs 10 years.
I bought a bulk of 4 drives some years back that were the exact same model raided together which all worked fine for a week. One day the stripe failed to boot and upon inspection there was one drive that had simply stopped functioning. Plugging in power and/or data had zero effect, it just never spooled up again. I won't mention names but the company initials were WD. (note, I've since had drives from them that have performed admirably)
u have no idea how familiar that is, I've had that HD for two year, took it out of old comp which died in feb after 5+ good years and would still been functioning, if i didn't knock it over :(
so I'm guessing that, that's it for that drive ................... still leaving it in to see if I get lucky but, I just lost all hope
unless there is a way to extract data from it
mcbeth said:
u have no idea how familiar that is, I've had that HD for two year, took it out of old comp which died in feb after 5+ good years and would still been functioning, if i didn't knock it over :(
I lost a week of captured video that way back in '07 by dropping an external :(
There are specialized businesses that are equipped to recover data on failed hard drives, but it's expensive. Backups are your friend 
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/saving-data-a-head-crash,1044.html