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That little oh shit moment — 8 Comments

  1. Pull the hard drive form the defunct device, it might just be the interface electronics that are dead. There’s a chance you could still pull the files by Jerry rigging it into a PC.

    • I’m 90% sure it’s the power at fault as the indicator light remains dark. The disk itself should be salvageable once I can get at it [it requires some kind of knife that’s fine enough to fit the minute crack in the case but strong enough to prise the case open]. Somewhere I have a docking unit that could accommodate the disk. Unfortunately I haven’t a clue where it is!

  2. A friend of mine had similar trouble, the black box in his situation being a mechanical drive in a case. It just stopped, as you say yours did and was dead as a doornail. After some experimentation I found the disc would run, intermittently but readably, in a different small case stolen from an old external drive of mine, crisis averted. The odd thing was that my old disc, which had donated its case for the experiment, worked cheerfully in either outer case. Something aged and off-spec and his drive being less tolerant perhaps? I hope you recover all the stuff that matters.

    • As I said above, I’m fairly positive the drive itself is fine. It’s a total failure and not intermittent. There isn’t even a glimmer of a pulse.

  3. Does your new ‘black box’ have more than one drive to provide redundancy? Striping is your friend.

    • I wish! Unfortunately I am constrained by budget. I’ll just continue with my old process – a master drive [the new one] with secondary removable disks to hold copies the really important files. My most important task is to have a couple of backups of my backups from the servers. [This is getting complicated!]

  4. We did the same with my wife’s last laptop when she got a new one.

    Put her old hard drive in a case and we use that for backup storage.

    • I’m sure the drive which is dead is a three and half inch one [PC type] and I no longer have a PC to move it into. I actually have a small selection of two and a half drives in docking ports which are a life saver. Well, maybe not a life saver but you know what I mean?

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