catastrophic hard drive problem

@crawfish

Think of me as a determined idiot with a screwdriver, with heavy emphasis on "idiot", who is just describing the stupid thing he did on a rainy, nostalgic afternoon.

Well your one step above me Crawfish, at least your smart enough to wait till a rainy day :)
I do appreciate you taking the time to describe how you did it.

But I took yours and others advice and tried something first... I yanked the drive out of the computer and took it into the friendly neighboorhood computer store, and asked them to mount it into a dock.... low and behold when doing that they were able to see and access all my files that I had been working on the last 2 weeks... so they are now securily on an external harddrive waiting to be transfered to my new harddrive that shipped today under warantee. So my wallet is $49.00 lighter, but a lot of hard work has been recovered.

So I'm sorry to say I won't be able to try your method, but it was a fun "war story" to read about.

I'll have to wait and see if I have any installation problems with the new drive.... so until then, thank you for all your help guys.

harleynut97 said:

But I took yours and others advice and tried something first... I yanked the drive out of the computer and took it into the friendly neighboorhood computer store, and asked them to mount it into a dock.... low and behold when doing that they were able to see and access all my files that I had been working on the last 2 weeks... so they are now securily on an external harddrive waiting to be transfered to my new harddrive that shipped today under warantee. So my wallet is $49.00 lighter, but a lot of hard work has been recovered.

That's great. It's always worth it to try with different equipment and/or OS before dipping into the desperate measures. Hopefully it was just an intermittent problem confined to that one drive, and it just happened to work when they tried it.

harleynut97 said:

@crawfish

Think of me as a determined idiot with a screwdriver, with heavy emphasis on "idiot", who is just describing the stupid thing he did on a rainy, nostalgic afternoon.

Well your one step above me Crawfish, at least your smart enough to wait till a rainy day :)
I do appreciate you taking the time to describe how you did it.

But I took yours and others advice and tried something first... I yanked the drive out of the computer and took it into the friendly neighboorhood computer store, and asked them to mount it into a dock.... low and behold when doing that they were able to see and access all my files that I had been working on the last 2 weeks... so they are now securily on an external harddrive waiting to be transfered to my new harddrive that shipped today under warantee. So my wallet is $49.00 lighter, but a lot of hard work has been recovered.

So I'm sorry to say I won't be able to try your method, but it was a fun "war story" to read about.

I'll have to wait and see if I have any installation problems with the new drive.... so until then, thank you for all your help guys.

Well, that's sorts out like big relief from a horrible headache. Though if I were you in that case I would have definitely set my data drive with RAID 1 set up to ensure I have always a full back up of those large important files with no sweat in case one of the hard drive fails.

@frozwire On the computer before this one, I actually had a raid 5 system and it saved my ass many times as I started having harddrives fail. I am going to look into purchasing another 2 tb drive and mirror the data.

On that subject, how can I determine if my current power supply, which currently powers a pretty decent video card, two harddrives, and other stuff could handle a 3rd harddrive? Are there any utilities I can download that would figure it out somehow?

New drive is supposed to arrive today.... fingers crossed

harleynut97 said:

On that subject, how can I determine if my current power supply, which currently powers a pretty decent video card, two harddrives, and other stuff could handle a 3rd harddrive? Are there any utilities I can download that would figure it out somehow?

Hard drives use less than 10 watts, so don't worry about that. If you want a 3rd hard drive, you need to confirm that your power supply in fact has a spare connector for the 3rd drive, that you have the appropriate cables, that your motherboard has a port for a 3rd drive, and that you have a drive bay in which to mount the drive in the case. That's about it.

Well you can refer to this >>PSU Wattage Calculator<< . It gives you an ideal power supply wattage based on your computer build requirements.

If you want a 3rd hard drive, you need to confirm that your power supply in fact has a spare connector for the 3rd drive

You bring up a very good point, I know I have some extra power cords, but they might be the older kind of power with 4 pins... are there adaptors that convert that kind of plug to a sata power plug?

I'll need to break open the box when my harddrive arrives and take a closer look. I know that I have a number of available sata ports (see diagram on post #12) Only 3 of them are being used. (thats assuming I can plug a 3rd harddrive into any of those ports)

@frozwire I have a 500w powersupply and used the calculator based on my current equipment it said I should have a minimum of 450 w

harleynut97 said:

If you want a 3rd hard drive, you need to confirm that your power supply in fact has a spare connector for the 3rd drive

You bring up a very good point, I know I have some extra power cords, but they might be the older kind of power with 4 pins... are there adaptors that convert that kind of plug to a sata power plug?

I'll need to break open the box when my harddrive arrives and take a closer look. I know that I have a number of available sata ports (see diagram on post #12) Only 3 of them are being used. (thats assuming I can plug a 3rd harddrive into any of those ports)

Yeah, you can buy adapters to convert those old Molex connectors to SATA if necessary but I'd guess your PSU has SATA connectors if it has any spares at all. You need to get in there and look.

I guess you bought another SATA cable the other day, so you should be good to go when your drive arrives.

Not sure how your motherboard SATA ports are set up, but it's possible that some of those ports run off a slower controller. Look at your manual or better yet go to the manufacturer's web site and dig into the motherboard documentation for detailed info about those ports and the controllers. You'd naturally want to connect your hard drives to a fast and reliable controller if at all possible.

I did find the manual for the motherboard and you were correct about the differences. It appears the two sata ports I am using now are the ones that are the sata 6gb. So unfortunately if I did add a third internal it would have to go into one of the 3gb slots. Not sure what the implications of that would be.

harleynut97 said:

I did find the manual for the motherboard and you were correct about the differences. It appears the two sata ports I am using now are the ones that are the sata 6gb. So unfortunately if I did add a third internal it would have to go into one of the 3gb slots. Not sure what the implications of that would be.

Hard drives are a lot slower than 3 Gb/s, so no problem.