** TELL US YOUR STORAGE NIGHTMARE STORIES ** WD COMPETITION

1nfamous

1nfamous

1nfamous

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10 May 2013
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99
Hey folks :)

Pretty simple but fun competition today for a WD My Passport Ultra 2TB! Tell us your storage horror stories, real or made-up, and we will pick our favourite to win this little bae:

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So come on, give us your worst :D We will select a winner next Monday.

UK & Ireland only.
 
I was looking after a server and had a drive fail on an file server array and was talking to the boss and said it's just the one and as long as we don't get anymore we are OK, and literally that moment I got a call from the other engineer saying another drive had failed. This was in a school and had lots of exam course work saved to it that day so wasn't backed up. Luckily replacing the first drive kicked the other back into life, apart from a messed up permission structure got everything back.
 
im sure its something everyones done before, in the days of Vista and HDDs i had 2 identical 250gb western digital hhds, i was doing a re-format, and i wiped the data hdd with all my stuff on it instead of the OS. didnt know until i re-booted and asked which version vista i wanted to run, then i had that really hot flushed oh **** feeling everything lost
 
Very simple...
I was doing an upgrade of the Mrs' machine and moving data around. Unfortunately during the move and copying data across from place to place, somehow her Fallout New Vegas saves corrupted (not sure if it was an unstable overclock, her machine had been done by her ex...). Hundreds of hours down the drain, and the saves seemed to be completely unrecoverable. The files were still there, but the internal data was corrupted, and nothing I could do to fix them :(
5 years later, I'm still getting pain for that one!

:(
True story :(
 
While working server/desktop support a few years ago I took an external HDD with a new image for our training machines on the other side of the country. After travelling all the way I went to image the first machine and rather than imaging the machine with the image on the HDD, I instead managed to image the HDD with the image from the PC :eek:

Spend ages going back south to get a fresh image and then back again to try again!
 
I worked in an local IT repair company once as my first job since leaving college. I was learning the ropes of IT in gerneral "on the job".

I was tasked with a data backup of a customers multi media PC. Great. Time to get my hands dirty.

I stripped his computer successfully and removed his 1TB SATA HDD (new on the market at the time). I went to connect this to our backup solution and in doing so I broke the data port plastic on the drive itself. Still to this day im not sure if it was brittle plastic, as I am always very careful with things of this nature. Either way:

Cue my panic....

This drive (at the time) was EXPENSIVE

THIS drive had the customers entire data collection stored on it (Photos, documents the usual irreplaceable stuff).

THIS DRIVE was going to cost me my job unless i manager to "bodge" my way out of it - something I was going to soon learn, I was actually quite good at.



I scrounged any tool i could find to make the job possible.

In the end i managed to macgyver some plastic (old loyalty card) and some hot melt to re-forge a connector piece to the drive so I was able to recover the customers data.

The drive though.... Well I was unable to replace this into the customers machine and in the end I had to come clean to him face to face on our shop floor.
Worried I was going to lose my job at the impending customers fury - He actually congratulated me on my bodge skills and brought me some beers for saving his data.

He understood accidents can happen!

THANK ****
 
I have worked with quite a few "Technical Sales" people over my career.

I think one of my best Was A demo of "How Raid 5 Works"
The hardware seller was so confident that it worked so well that he yanked out a HDD to show the system worked on a live System on one of our remote offices, He then reinserted the drive and demo the software showed it "Rebuilding" with no down time.

The boss of the office walks in and asks what are we up to again said Seller, gives another little speech and yanks the HDD out again, problem for him was he yanked out a different one, due to the set up The drive could only have one drive "fail" to maintain data.

Cue lots of people filing into the room asking why the server system was down and when would it be back up.
Two days of pulling data from a cloud back up due to terrible broadband speed before being anywhere near back online.

I still wince whenever mentions Raid 5 issues to me to this day.
 
I took over the onsite IT support for another company in our group last year. They had no previous IT onsite instead it was done by one of the Finance guys who turned out was as dodgy as hell. Their fileserver was a decomissioned 10 years old domain controller running Windows 2003 and complaining on low disk space and a few other errors for good measure. The Finance team had been replacing the backup tapes regular as clockwork every weekday thinking it was being backed up but I discovered the software had not ran a backup for 18 months ! They were also using an ancient Pentium 4 laptop as a console which had some vital interconnect software which had died. To replace the laptop/console I used a desktop PC with Windows 2008 R2 that I had been using for imaging testing. I warned them they needed to buy a new server quick as this might fall over at any time. I then did a one off backup from the 2003 server to the desktop PC which just happened to have a 2tb hard drive as luck would have it and this was to take 23 hours. Next day the 2003 server rebooted itself and could not find the RAID/hard drives. The users onsite were horrified when I told them as there were 700gb's of data and they thought they had lost the lot especially when I pointed out the backups they were doing never worked. Fortunately my filecopy had completed so by the seat of my pants I quickly setup the desktop PC as a fileserver and told them it would take 24hrs for me to setup a temporary fileserver. I kicked off the restore and as the old server was also their print server I configured the new one thus. I then created two logon scripts so when the users next logged on it re-directed their mapped drives to the new fileserver and re-mapped their printer settings to the new print server. Then 24 hours later once everything was configured/security settings etc made sure the new backup was working too. Turned out the new server took 3 months to arrive (dont ask) so I then had to change the logon scripts to point to the new server and did a restore to the new server to get all the files on there and also installed a new NAS for the backups at a different location for data recovery purposes. It was a bit touch and go at one point but Keep Calm is the motto.
 
It was the cold hard winter of 2015 and I was in the process of upgrading my PC.
As part of the upgrade I had transferred all my save games from years of gaming to my trusty back up hard drive, which also contained my entire life of music up to this point and some music my old teenage band had made.

Feeling pretty chuffed after watching the transfer bar for a couple of hours (this was before the mighty SSD) I was ready, shut the PC down, dissambled it, plugged all my new shiny bits in and turned it on.
Now I had just got a new drive but I was presented with 2 Harddrive options at the windows installation screen, "weird" I thought and formatted both before installing to the first one on the list.
You can probably guess where this is going, booted up windows, my drive wasn't present and there was a brand new drive in its place.
That was the first time I ever cried over technology, I lost 200+ hours of fallout and other games, lost my entire music collection, including songs from bands that I'd painstakenly recorded off the radio and worst of all, I lost my teenage bands campy emo demo CD from the time when I was a complicated *********.

Looking back I do wonder if this was a blessing in disguise...
 
I'm in the middle of a storage "crisis" right now actually.
Last Christmas I bought a 128Gb SSD knowing that prices would just keep going up to replace the HDD in my dad's PC. It was a non-urgent upgrade so I only got round to doing it on the 6th this month.
After some work, I manage to slim the HDD down enough to clone it over. I find some data cloning software and clone the disk over. Upon rebooting I find that it didn't work. :( I check some guides and found out I needed to format the SSD as MBR because that's what the HDD was set to.
So I reformat the drive and wait an hour for it to clone again. Success!
I check that it's working OK and all seems good so I wipe the HDD and move most of the documents and pictures over. I change the default save locations so documents are saved on the HDD and I power the system off for the night.
The next day I boot it up so I can change the downloads folder and finish moving stuff about. I uninstalled a program and wandered off. When I came back Windows was frozen, strange I wonder why that's happened, the desktop disappears and it looks like it's recovering...
CRITICAL PROCESS DIED
Oh, it just blue screened. Fun. Whatever, random stuff happens. So I reboot.
EFI Shell version 2.31 [4.655]
Eh? What's the matter? I go into the bios, the SSD is no longer detected...

After one day of use, the drive died. I submitted an RMA on the 8th. It took forever to get to the store and they said a replacement will be sent out a few days later. That was last Thursday, it hasn't been sent out for delivery yet...
So yeah, of course, all the blame was piled on me. I cloned the drive specifically so all the user profiles were kept but apparently, that's not allowed. Luckily the most important files were kept but I expect to keep finding things that got lost and to never hear the end of this one... Needless to say, backups are very important to me now. It's even worse than that time I blew up the laptop HDD in a similar situation.
 
a long time ago I had two incidental sized hard drives. One of them was a bit faster than the other, as it was a new drive. The older drive had my data, save-games, etc. basically everything I had done on a PC. I wanted to move Windows over to the faster drive, so the boot-up time was lower and general system response was faster.

At the windows install screen, I picked a drive and deleted the partition. The install went fine and after a little bit of time it was all up and running until I checked Explorer. I saw one drive with barely anything on it, and the other was blank. Turns out I got the numbers mixed and instead of installing Windows to the new drive, I overwrote my data. To this day, I always unplug all the drives apart from the one I am installing Windows - so I never do that mistake again. I also backup things too :)
 
Bought a HP laptop....from a store... ( not this one... unfortunately )

SSD went crazy, lost everything...
Bought a used HDD (on ebay)... and it went bonkers as well after like 2 weeks...
Pulled my hair out of my head and pushed my sleeves up saying "You won't dye on me Mot*** ****r
Spent the next 5 days with it hanging inside my PC using different software to debug it and recover my data...
And in the 5th day...Finally Success! I see some data...
And I grab it...
And it goes with like 180 kbytes/s ....
And I wait and wait...and hours pass, than days...
Just to find it with a big error on the screen..
I start again..and find that it is copying only if I hang it on a side at an angle... and first my gf moves it (By mistake...) than my dog.... than the ****g wind draft (either that or I have a freaking ghost )
I go once more... with the last bit of energy left...
At this point I just see file names having no idea what's what... but still happy...
And leave it to copy...for 3 days 14 h and some minutes +- the pizza I had on that day...

And ...to my despair I only recovered some Porn the previous owner had on the HDD...
At this time I have no working hdd, no data or files, my Desktop PC got ****d up as well (excuse my french) the MB and CPU are at warranty and here I am from my Work PC...

N.B. at this point I'm way out of the return window for the HDD and just got an email back from HP saying I ran out of warranty.

Happy Mondays,

BW
 
Losing over 280Gb of my favourite ever Porn downloads was a traumatic experience, for which Seagate should apologise for, to my face.
 
1. Seagate's "boot of death". Russian roulette to see if the drive's number of boots would overflow the internal log and lock all data out.

2. Trying to convert from one drive to another, going from MBR to UEFI and GPT. Ended up with an unbootable system drive with all the data on it, and a bootable drive with no data.

3. Standing in front of two S81 Sequent Servers, I point to the left storage array, tell the Sequent engineer he can switch that one off. Engineer goes to the back of the array, doesn't realise that he's now standing behind the arrays and that the one he needs to power down is on the right as he's looking at it, proceeds to hard crash an array that stops several hundred people working, and screws up hotel reservations all over the world. Takes us a day to recover from incremental tape backups and reprocess a day's worth of data.

4. I come in to find the support team and half the development team standing around a Sun disk array, telling me they haven't been able to get it online for several hours. They list all the various technical and reconfiguration solutions they have tried, none of which have worked. I proceed to fix the problem in two minutes by changing the fuse in the power lead.

5. Deciding to image from an offline disk to back over a live boot disk. Thought I'd give it a go as there's no reason it wouldn't work right? Very, very wrong.
 
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This all started around a year ago when the Samsung HDD that was (and still is) being used as a main OS drive for all the seven or so years that it had been in service decided to mess around for around thirty seconds (with the drive spinning down then starting back up and the read/write arm making a lot of noise) before going back to normal with the event log reporting a bad block and the hard drive showing more available space then it should have had.
While there was some panic, it wasn't that necessary since I did have a partial backup (it was on a 320GB external HDD) of the main contents but it did have a knock back as I was using that computer to run certain games that it could run better them my laptop (and in fact, none of the games that are installed have been run with the exception of a few more recently) and I decided to get a new hard drive that would be able to do a full backup of all the files I needed to protect in case it failed again and didn't start back up.
Roll on to earlier on this year and the 320GB external hard drive that I'd been using as a backup now for several computers (since it was storing all the video files I'd created) starts developing issues of its own where it wouldn't spin up when connected (this is a 2.5" HDD and only required one USB connection) which while it was happening before, it wasn't happening regularly until a month or so ago where it outright refused to spin up when connected to the front USB ports on my newer computer which got me worried since as I've already mentioned it was acting as storage for files that had no backup elsewhere so I decided to plug it into the only available USB ports on the back (which were USB 3.0 but after sacrificing my keyboard to test it did also work in the back USB 2.0 ports as well) and it got further then the main light in the unit coming on and it constantly beeping as me, so I decided then and there to take all the files that I needed to off that drive and put them on the second hard drive (which is being used for game installs and is already over half full) to make sure if that portable did fail, it didn't take those critical video files with it.
 
It was waaaay back in the days of the marvellous days of the Commodore64.
As per usual, I was up before anyone else & few hours before school, so I was pottering about & decided to set about programming something for giggles. A Chess game if I recall.
Time flies by & I've got to head off to school & I realise I've not saved anything.

Tearing the room apart to find a cassette, not knowing what's on any of them because I'd a bad habit of not writing on them, I grabbed one & saved what I'd done so far & left it on near the window.

School's over, homework was completed before got off of the bus & went out to play.
Eventually I get in doors & head up to continue programming when..... No tape to be found near the window.

One of the brothers had decided they'd wanted to record music from the radio that night & had nicked some tapes.

Buh bye Chess game, you'll be remembered :(
 
A failed HD nearly cost me my Liver!

Let me explain, I was in the Military and posted down to the Falklands for 3 months, thats 3 long soul crushing months with only penguins, sheep & dial-up internet for company. Knowing this was going to be a hard slog I filled a 2TB WD hard drive with movie's, TV shows (which I legally owned M'lud) and errrrrr........."miscellaneous". Now this was one of the 1st HD's with a Micro USB connector, which have since been ditched for being incredibly unreliable, instead of the more common Mini USB ones so maybe you can imagine the utter horror which went through my mind the first time I plugged it into my laptop and it just sat there clicking :(

With nothing to do every night for the next three whole months, except go to the gym or pub, I picked the obvious choice and pickled my Liver like a good un!

So you owe me WD, you owe me big time! :D
 
Instead of making up a massive wall of text, I'll keep it short and simple.

Bought a portable drive from Argos for a good price alittle while ago, proper chuffed. Got home, plugged it in its alive! great! I leave it to copy some files and go to make a sandwich, I come back and to my horror my cat has decided my shiny new drive is an excellent place to have a little wee, as cat do. Needless to say it wasn't working anymore and it stunk of you no what. Took it back to Argos I got some funny looks, I kept my mouth shut, got a replacement after a supervisor came to look and sped walked out of the store before they say anything.

Never trust the feline menace.
 
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