Originally Posted by
rans6andrew
We have a couple of these machines which are two or three years old. One of them has a 1TB hard drive, the other a .5TB hard drive, both are rotating platter thingies. The units are the same model as far as can be seen.
Both are fairly full of recorded stuff.
The 1TB unit has thrown a wobbler last evening when the picture and sound suddenly stopped and then became intermittent at a slow rate, pausing for several tens of seconds between 1 or 2 seconds of play. There was the sound of the hard disk access suggesting that a recording that had been set was still happening. We left it to recover and went to bed. Today the machine goes through the waking up procedure but never completes.............. There are some of the expected screen messages showing the waking up process and it gets to the second part of what it should do from memory and then... nothing.
Some questions:
If I return it to Humax for repair will they lose all of the recorded material?
If I remove the drive from the faulty machine might I be able to read the files off it with anything I have to hand? I have a disk caddy to USB unit which can power up a disk drive and allow access to the files IF the format is common to either a Win8 PC or my Linux Mint machines.
Is there any point in swapping the drive from the bad unit to the good unit to see what happens? As the drives are different sizes I wonder if anything else in the machines is different to allow the OS to load, bios settings not on the disk could cause both machines to end up broken .....
Anyone?
Rans6....................................................... ..............
Sounds like you have physical damage. Running a spinning drive with audible internal loose elements is just inviting further damage. The ONLY way to ensure no further data loss is to send it off for clean room data recovery. I have done this a number of times where customers have valued their data as irrecoverable. Yes they have paid the five figure price for the privilege, but they did get their data back as the drive is carefully disassembled in ultra-clean room conditions, cleaned, reassembled and the data copied onto a new drive using know working electronics. Don't do this at home unless you just want the drive magnets and platters to play with, and don't mind losing all data.
In your case, the shows will eventually come around again, hopefully, so somebody else has a copy. It is not like they are NASA deep space recordings or BBC shows and have been lost to mankind forever. Humax may replace the drives, but they will not do data recovery for you, at least not for free.
Doing a direct copy to another drive
may get
most of the data off your old drive. Setting to drive copy software to ignore bad sectors will mean that files that have bad areas will be corrupt as chunks will be missing on the copies, and unless you have a copy of what sectors map to what files, you might not know which files have not been fully preserved. If your stars are aligned, the bad sectors may be areas that do not currently have any valid data pointing to them, and all your data files remain intact on the new drive. If so, go buy a lottery ticket and enjoy your new found good karma.
The other consideration is while you are copying
disk-to-disk instead of
file-to-file, all the bad areas (not just the ones flagged as in use) are re-tried a few times, and the drive is still spinning while this extended data transfer is in progress. If you truly have catastrophic drive damage, the longer your drive is spinning, the greater your final loss is going to be. Conversely, if your drive is fairly full and fragmented, file-to-file copy is going to involve a lot more head movement across the faulty platters, and the amount of devastation will be greater.
If your drive is degrading and has ever expanding bad areas, the Humax software (probably some form of Linux) may be mapping them out of service and saving your data to known good areas. In this case, take it as a timely warning and replace the drive and copy over your data before it fails altogether. Most drive failures give some warning - if you are looking for them. In you case, the warnings are quite clear. Do not procrastinate.
1Tb drives are quite cheap these days. Worth trying, if only just for the experience and awareness that backups are a necessary part of computing these days. Like the Vatican Bank motto: Jesus saves, so should you!
If you just want to isolate the problem, swapping a known working drive into the suspect box sounds like a easy task to confirm the electronics are not faulty and you hard drive is on the way out. Spinning hard drives have been carefully designed over decades of experience to survive the warranty period, and often not much more. The manufacture date will be on the drive near the serial number. If it is still under warranty, you will get a blank hard drive (often reconditioned and not new), and an offer of data recovery on your old one, AT YOUR OWN EXPENSE, if the manufacturer comes to the party.
Please keep us informed of what you eventually end up doing.