Associate
Unpluging the harddrive in the wifes old pc I managed to snap the power bit out of the hard drive still connected to the psu wire
** TELL US YOUR STORAGE NIGHTMARE STORIES ** WD COMPETITION
- Thread starter 1nfamous
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Associate
Several years ago, whilst I was working as a field engineer for a 3rd party maintenance company, I nearly ceased trading for multiple high street retail outlets (Arcadia Group/Rubicon Retail).
Whilst diagnosing a failing drive on an IBM SAN in a datacentre, I used a poor choice of words that lead to an administrator removing the failing HDD without flagging the drive as failed. This in turn made the SAN start to lock up whilst it tried processing where the drive had gone, which it was just identifying.
Within 5 minutes all hell was breaking loose as back office systems in the high-street stores were failing over to local storage due to the inability to connect to the SAN at the datacentre.
I have never again used the phrase “Right, we can pull it now” without making sure that either no one else is within reach, or I have triple checked and it is ready to remove.
Whilst diagnosing a failing drive on an IBM SAN in a datacentre, I used a poor choice of words that lead to an administrator removing the failing HDD without flagging the drive as failed. This in turn made the SAN start to lock up whilst it tried processing where the drive had gone, which it was just identifying.
Within 5 minutes all hell was breaking loose as back office systems in the high-street stores were failing over to local storage due to the inability to connect to the SAN at the datacentre.
I have never again used the phrase “Right, we can pull it now” without making sure that either no one else is within reach, or I have triple checked and it is ready to remove.
Samsung f1 drive died with a pop and smoke, it had a pic of a clothed big boobed ex on, silly me had no backups, she had deleted her facebook 
bought another f1 drive took it apart and swapped the hdd plates inside them about, but it just clunks, I still can still see the picture in my head, life sucks sometimes
bought another f1 drive took it apart and swapped the hdd plates inside them about, but it just clunks, I still can still see the picture in my head, life sucks sometimesAbout 5 years ago I was helping my mate build his PC and I hadn't done one in a while so I was acting way more confident than I was. Anyway he was at Uni studying a PHD and had been for the past 4 or so years. Once we had completed the build we wanted to test it so we quickly plugged in his keyboard to the back of the PC and his mouse to the front. For some reason the mouse wouldn't work at all so I went to get my spare one and plugged it in the back, all working absolutely fine. About 15 mins later my mate plugs in his USB stick to the front of the PC (which contained everything for his PHD on) and Window's wasn't picking it up. So I just thought I hadn't plugged the front USB headers in. Well turns out I did but I connected the Firewire ports to the front USB ports! Completely fried his mouse and his USB stick with years worth of work on it. Barely any of it was backed up! He still hates me for it so if I won this I would give him this drive 
Soldato
I have a black WD 1TB external drive, or should I say I USED to have one. One of my twins Lewis, has a thing for sticking stuff down the front of his nappy. He managed to climb up on to my Noble chair, grab the external HD, stick it down his nappy and ran about for a while before I noticed what he had done. Needless to say the drive was ruined as most HD's aren't designed to be urinated over by a toddler. What makes it worse is that I used it to store family pics and when I tried to dry it out in the hotpress to see if I could get it working again, the smell of pee now takes over the towels and clean clothes in the hotpress.
Associate
Many moons ago I had a a Quantum Fireball that kicked the bucket - to be fair it had seen and done a lot. My friends and I decided to give it a good send off and gave it a Viking burial, we were three sheets to the wind at the time.
We set it going on the University lake not realising at the time that a group were sailing their toy boats there from the other side - our jaws dropped when it hit and set the sails of the first boat alight, by the time it hit the second we were already on our feet and in flight! We avoided that lake for a good long time afterwards.
Fireball was a very appropriate name for that drive!
We set it going on the University lake not realising at the time that a group were sailing their toy boats there from the other side - our jaws dropped when it hit and set the sails of the first boat alight, by the time it hit the second we were already on our feet and in flight! We avoided that lake for a good long time afterwards.
Fireball was a very appropriate name for that drive!
Soldato
I have a media server in a HP MicroServer.
Populated with 4 x 8TB drives. All in raid. The drives had a total of 27GB of data on them.
One drive failed and wiped out the whole data. No backup etc.
I learnt from that mistake, I now use a raid array that has redundancy.
EDIT: If I said the data was 27GB of midget Pron would it help?
Populated with 4 x 8TB drives. All in raid. The drives had a total of 27GB of data on them.
One drive failed and wiped out the whole data. No backup etc.
I learnt from that mistake, I now use a raid array that has redundancy.
EDIT: If I said the data was 27GB of midget Pron would it help?
So many years ago work included an environment hot for computers. We had one PC that kept locking up so put one of those temperature strips on the case, it reached 50 deg C one day. The HD didn't like the temps so we removed it. Being inquisitive folks we drilled out the screws as they wouldn't undo normally, covering the HD platters with filings. Anyway a quick blow later we had the naked drive running on the desk. For an experiment we decided to see how long it would work, turns out it survived over 2 weeks working in air! This was a long time ago when HD drives were measured in megabytes. I bet modern drives with their higher densities and spin speeds wouldn't be so tolerant. We had backups so no harm done.
In my previous job at a small IT shop I took on quite a few work experience staff members to help introduce them into the wonderful world of IT. On one particular occasion I was half way through teaching a work ex about carrying out O/S repairs using the applicable windows O/S disks and I had to go through to the front shop to help a customer and just told him "don't touch anything with this machine but just go around and tidy up any tools I've left lying around" I was gone for a good half an hour and clearly it does not take half an hour to tidy up tools. Upon my return I commended him on how well he had done until I saw it...the machine was currently half way through a clean install of the machine. This machine simply needed a repair carrying out as some files were corrupted. This customer was a professional photographer and it had over 1.5TB of his clients photos (including multiple weddings) and I cried inside. Fortunately, after 4 days of recovery I was able to get 99.9% of the data back.
Years ago I was working at a small hotel upgrading the ram in the pc. The pc was in a tight corner and all the cables were a tangled mess. I thought I could get the lid of the case without unplugging the spaghetti, as I pulled to pc forward the cables pulled tight and a tiny puff of smoke came from the hard disk, 4-year-old hotel database gone up in smoke.
My uncle was celebrating his 90th birthday with some friends, and told me he was planning to move away. He wasn't sure if he would return, so he left me some of his belongings, among which was a very old hard drive. One of his friends, a strange old man with a long beard, saw the drive and was quite alarmed. He told me it was an ancient artifact of great power and that it must be destroyed. The only way to do this was by taking it to the place it was created, an ancient volcano in a faraway land, where it must be cast in to the fiery molten lava. Failure to do so would see the return of an all powerful evil force that would lay waste to our land and bring eternal darkness to the world. I didn't like that sound of that one bit, so I set forth on the long and treacherous journey with several of my friends. It was a pretty crazy experience I must say, and we met some very peculiar folk along the way, several of my friends even died. We got there in the end though, threw the hard drive in to the lava and eventually made our way back home with the help of some giant eagles. My uncle told me upon our return that it was all a ruse and he just had to get rid of his porn collection before his wife found out.
Well mine may not seem like a huge problem but to me I lost a lot of my first ever World of Warcraft raiding videos, we where the first on our server to down Ragnaros in Molten Core, along with Black Wing Lair. Very fond memories of these as where some of my best times gaming even up until now at the ripe old age of 32.
Abit my own fault this but I had just formatted my PC to Windows 7 for the first time and I thought things are all going well as my backups are on my external 2TB drive, then I plugged the drive in but chose the wrong power cable! Amateur mistake as it was actually my laptop charger. All I heard was a tiny click and then nothing, Panic set in as this drive also had my Photoshop work on as well as my website templates.
I then tried to take the external case off the drive which was a nightmare but finally got the hard drive out and plugged straight into PC and still nothing, then looked on the back of the PCB and 3 different components had blown up, so me being me back then I sent it off to a hard drive repair company, £175 and 3 weeks later I had not heard a word! Tried ringing them, tried phoning them and nothing, I thought I would check there website and low and behold gone bust and could I get it contact with anyone nope! I ended up driving to Portsmouth from Cambridge and the building was completely abandoned
Not as bad as other peoples data going or being lost but my old gaming memories I will never get back Sad times.
Abit my own fault this but I had just formatted my PC to Windows 7 for the first time and I thought things are all going well as my backups are on my external 2TB drive, then I plugged the drive in but chose the wrong power cable! Amateur mistake as it was actually my laptop charger. All I heard was a tiny click and then nothing, Panic set in as this drive also had my Photoshop work on as well as my website templates.
I then tried to take the external case off the drive which was a nightmare but finally got the hard drive out and plugged straight into PC and still nothing, then looked on the back of the PCB and 3 different components had blown up, so me being me back then I sent it off to a hard drive repair company, £175 and 3 weeks later I had not heard a word! Tried ringing them, tried phoning them and nothing, I thought I would check there website and low and behold gone bust and could I get it contact with anyone nope! I ended up driving to Portsmouth from Cambridge and the building was completely abandoned
Not as bad as other peoples data going or being lost but my old gaming memories I will never get back
Sad times.
Soldato
haha! 100% agree with this!
Having a drive die is never fun! Just recently lost a drive containing all sorts! ironically it was my backup drive, which I was told off on here for, not backing it up
Associate
Real story [WARNING: WALL OF TEXT BELOW]:
Twas my final year of uni and I had worked hard on revising for the final exams. I had spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours, writing up the contents of all my lectures that year (and the year before) into Microsoft Word, in an easy to read, understand and consume format. Suffice to say, those write-ups were my primary source of revision before the exams. The hard drive also contained many years of MP3 music, I'd accumulated, but that wasn't as urgent as the lecture note were. It was around about this time of year about a month or two before the final exams (which had the most weight over the final degree marking) and unlike some of my friends I gave up my social life (for the most part, I still went over to visit pals during weekends) to focus on revision.
I was taking a break playing some GTA5 whilst listening to a podcast on my gaming laptop (a custom version of an MSI GT70) when I looked at the time and saw it was almost time to cook dinner, time for a shower before I did so. I turned the game off and went to pause the podcast and the laptop just turned off. On its own. After faffing about a bit, turning the shower on to heat up and then coming back to find the shower door was open and the bathroom had water all over the floor, my stress suddenly amplified. After my shower I called up some people, googled the issue to try and figure out why my expensive gaming laptop wouldn't turn on. I didn't really get anywhere, so I cooked dinner and chilled out by watching some shows on my phone.
The next day I took my laptop down to the computer repair shop for a diagnosis. I cost me a tenner (AKA I was ripped off), but I was desperate at this crucial moment of my degree and the guy told me that it was a motherboard issue with the laptop, everthing else was working fine. It turns out that MSI no longer manufactured the parts for that chipset so the laptop was dead. Oh well, at least I still have the hard drives with all the precious data on. Any PC would do as long as I had my lecture write-ups.
That weekend, my dad bought round my brother's desktop PC for me to use in the meanwhile. I was setting it up and plugged in the 750GB hard drive that contained all the crucial lecture write-ups. Nothing. Hard drive wasn't detected after an hour of fiddling around. We ended up going to PC world, the only place in Bristol open that time on a Sunday. I had to spend almost £400 on a 2-in-1 (the only one that could support 2.5" hard drives) for a temporary replacement of the laptop (I sent the PC back with my dad) and an external hard drive bay to access the hard drives. Again, I put the hard drive with the files into the external drive bay and nothing happened. I tried it with the SSD from the laptop, which only had the Windows OS installed on it and nothing else. That worked, but the mechanical hard drive wouldn't.
I Googled data recovery and fixing hard drives online. What I got back was that it was possible to fix if it was only an issue with the PCB. But it would cost a hefty amount. I phoned up a few companies and settled with the cheapest quote I got. The guy came along and took the hard drive. That was it for a month. A month that I tried my best to flick through folders of not very helpful hand-written notes, suffice to say my revision had dropped upon losing the lecture notes. The most I heard back from the guy was that he had to order in a PCB from the US and that it was taking time to arrive.
The strangest thing was, most people in my position would panic and be very upset. After all, this was the worst possible time for this to happen, right before the final exams that my entire education had been building up to. Not only was I calm, but I somehow managed to keep a smile on my face. I felt like nothing bad had really happened, perhaps it had a lot to do with the fact that I was very happy with life at the time. Maybe I had just accepted that there was nothing I could do.
A few weeks before the exams started, the guy phoned me up. He asked how I'd like to pay and if I wanted to keep the hard drive after transferring the data off of it. Since it was such a large amount, it had to be a cheque. Unlike most uni students, I had been sensible with my money and saved up for a rainy day. I even made and eventually manged to keep a new years resolution to stop buying booze, in order to help save money. I guess this was the rainy day. He came round and I stuck it in the external hard drive bay and set it to transfer the precious data to the 500GB hard drive that came with the 2-in-1 I'd bought. It started off fast and over time got slower and slower. I paid the guy more than what the trip to PC World cost me, anyone who has had data recovered form a hard drive will know the ridiculous cost of it. I had my data back and with a few weeks to spare.
I waved goodbye to that hard drive, which oddly appeared to have died upon finishing it's final crucial job. A very close call considering I had just spent a few hundred quid on recovering/fixing it. I also used the external drive bay to move a few settings and things off the Intel SSD. And here's the cherry on top. The next morning I plugged in the SSD to format it. Nothing. It turned out that the cheap POS external drive bay I got from PC world was killing off the hard drives. A perfectly working SSD bit the dust. No wonder the original hard drive died again after the transfer.
I managed to resume proper revision and finished my final exams feeling that I'd done my best to revise for them. A friend of mine told me that I should have claimed extenuating circumstances for losing my revision notes, but I personally couldn't be bothered and also felt that it probably wasn't appropriate for such a claim. After the exams, the notes were no longer of any use to me. Had the laptop died then instead of a couple months earlier, the situation wouldn't have been quite as urgent. The results came in a couple months later and that was that. I didn't quite get the mark I was hoping for, but it wasn't terrible and I graduated with no issues. To this day, my dad claims that I would have gotten better results had I not had the issue with the laptop dying and taking the hard drive with it. He thinks that me playing games on the laptop killed it. But then again, he seems to hate all fun things anyway.
Years on, following a miserable year of unemployment and being diagnosed with stress and anxiety straight after uni, I eventually got an decent job, related to what I'd studied in my degree. To this day, I still have all my data that cost me so much to recover. It currently sits in the 2TB Western Digital Black hard drive in my PC, most importantly all that music. Also some game saves, but those weren't as crucial with cloud saves and such existing nowadays. And of course, despite having no more use for it whatsoever, I even still have all of those once crucial lecture write-ups on here too. I had planned to go RAID 1 when I built my PC, as a back-up in case of hard drive failure again but I never did buy the 2nd drive. I'm planning to buy a 2nd 2TB drive next month and finally set up either RAID 1 or some form of backup. So that next time, I'll be prepared and I won't have to spend absurd amounts of money recovering the hard drive.
Edit:
TLDR: Hard drive containing revision and music died shortly before final exams and cost lots to recover. Cheap external drive bay then killed it after transferring the data off to a new drive and also killed an Intel brand SSD that was working perfectly fine.
Twas my final year of uni and I had worked hard on revising for the final exams. I had spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours, writing up the contents of all my lectures that year (and the year before) into Microsoft Word, in an easy to read, understand and consume format. Suffice to say, those write-ups were my primary source of revision before the exams. The hard drive also contained many years of MP3 music, I'd accumulated, but that wasn't as urgent as the lecture note were. It was around about this time of year about a month or two before the final exams (which had the most weight over the final degree marking) and unlike some of my friends I gave up my social life (for the most part, I still went over to visit pals during weekends) to focus on revision.
I was taking a break playing some GTA5 whilst listening to a podcast on my gaming laptop (a custom version of an MSI GT70) when I looked at the time and saw it was almost time to cook dinner, time for a shower before I did so. I turned the game off and went to pause the podcast and the laptop just turned off. On its own. After faffing about a bit, turning the shower on to heat up and then coming back to find the shower door was open and the bathroom had water all over the floor, my stress suddenly amplified. After my shower I called up some people, googled the issue to try and figure out why my expensive gaming laptop wouldn't turn on. I didn't really get anywhere, so I cooked dinner and chilled out by watching some shows on my phone.
The next day I took my laptop down to the computer repair shop for a diagnosis. I cost me a tenner (AKA I was ripped off), but I was desperate at this crucial moment of my degree and the guy told me that it was a motherboard issue with the laptop, everthing else was working fine. It turns out that MSI no longer manufactured the parts for that chipset so the laptop was dead. Oh well, at least I still have the hard drives with all the precious data on. Any PC would do as long as I had my lecture write-ups.
That weekend, my dad bought round my brother's desktop PC for me to use in the meanwhile. I was setting it up and plugged in the 750GB hard drive that contained all the crucial lecture write-ups. Nothing. Hard drive wasn't detected after an hour of fiddling around. We ended up going to PC world, the only place in Bristol open that time on a Sunday. I had to spend almost £400 on a 2-in-1 (the only one that could support 2.5" hard drives) for a temporary replacement of the laptop (I sent the PC back with my dad) and an external hard drive bay to access the hard drives. Again, I put the hard drive with the files into the external drive bay and nothing happened. I tried it with the SSD from the laptop, which only had the Windows OS installed on it and nothing else. That worked, but the mechanical hard drive wouldn't.
I Googled data recovery and fixing hard drives online. What I got back was that it was possible to fix if it was only an issue with the PCB. But it would cost a hefty amount. I phoned up a few companies and settled with the cheapest quote I got. The guy came along and took the hard drive. That was it for a month. A month that I tried my best to flick through folders of not very helpful hand-written notes, suffice to say my revision had dropped upon losing the lecture notes. The most I heard back from the guy was that he had to order in a PCB from the US and that it was taking time to arrive.
The strangest thing was, most people in my position would panic and be very upset. After all, this was the worst possible time for this to happen, right before the final exams that my entire education had been building up to. Not only was I calm, but I somehow managed to keep a smile on my face. I felt like nothing bad had really happened, perhaps it had a lot to do with the fact that I was very happy with life at the time. Maybe I had just accepted that there was nothing I could do.
A few weeks before the exams started, the guy phoned me up. He asked how I'd like to pay and if I wanted to keep the hard drive after transferring the data off of it. Since it was such a large amount, it had to be a cheque. Unlike most uni students, I had been sensible with my money and saved up for a rainy day. I even made and eventually manged to keep a new years resolution to stop buying booze, in order to help save money. I guess this was the rainy day. He came round and I stuck it in the external hard drive bay and set it to transfer the precious data to the 500GB hard drive that came with the 2-in-1 I'd bought. It started off fast and over time got slower and slower. I paid the guy more than what the trip to PC World cost me, anyone who has had data recovered form a hard drive will know the ridiculous cost of it. I had my data back and with a few weeks to spare.
I waved goodbye to that hard drive, which oddly appeared to have died upon finishing it's final crucial job. A very close call considering I had just spent a few hundred quid on recovering/fixing it. I also used the external drive bay to move a few settings and things off the Intel SSD. And here's the cherry on top. The next morning I plugged in the SSD to format it. Nothing. It turned out that the cheap POS external drive bay I got from PC world was killing off the hard drives. A perfectly working SSD bit the dust. No wonder the original hard drive died again after the transfer.
I managed to resume proper revision and finished my final exams feeling that I'd done my best to revise for them. A friend of mine told me that I should have claimed extenuating circumstances for losing my revision notes, but I personally couldn't be bothered and also felt that it probably wasn't appropriate for such a claim. After the exams, the notes were no longer of any use to me. Had the laptop died then instead of a couple months earlier, the situation wouldn't have been quite as urgent. The results came in a couple months later and that was that. I didn't quite get the mark I was hoping for, but it wasn't terrible and I graduated with no issues. To this day, my dad claims that I would have gotten better results had I not had the issue with the laptop dying and taking the hard drive with it. He thinks that me playing games on the laptop killed it. But then again, he seems to hate all fun things anyway.
Years on, following a miserable year of unemployment and being diagnosed with stress and anxiety straight after uni, I eventually got an decent job, related to what I'd studied in my degree. To this day, I still have all my data that cost me so much to recover. It currently sits in the 2TB Western Digital Black hard drive in my PC, most importantly all that music. Also some game saves, but those weren't as crucial with cloud saves and such existing nowadays. And of course, despite having no more use for it whatsoever, I even still have all of those once crucial lecture write-ups on here too. I had planned to go RAID 1 when I built my PC, as a back-up in case of hard drive failure again but I never did buy the 2nd drive. I'm planning to buy a 2nd 2TB drive next month and finally set up either RAID 1 or some form of backup. So that next time, I'll be prepared and I won't have to spend absurd amounts of money recovering the hard drive.
Edit:
TLDR: Hard drive containing revision and music died shortly before final exams and cost lots to recover. Cheap external drive bay then killed it after transferring the data off to a new drive and also killed an Intel brand SSD that was working perfectly fine.
Last edited:
I had a hard drive that only ran for a few minutes before overheating and erroring to a standstill. Cooling seemed to be the thing to allow me to transfer all the data off to a new drive, but how to keep a hard drive cool during the process? A bag of frozen peas was installed. Worked a treat.
Hi all.
My story is short and untrue.
My wife and I spent along time a few years ago arguing over who was gunna clean out and tidy the garage ( she wanted rid of my old computer bits and I'm a hoarder).
Things came to a point where I was told the stuff goes or I will be sleeping out there with it until it does.
I won the argument and have kept everything that was in storage, but it's a nightmare sleeping beside it when it's cold.
My story is short and untrue.
My wife and I spent along time a few years ago arguing over who was gunna clean out and tidy the garage ( she wanted rid of my old computer bits and I'm a hoarder).
Things came to a point where I was told the stuff goes or I will be sleeping out there with it until it does.
I won the argument and have kept everything that was in storage, but it's a nightmare sleeping beside it when it's cold.
Real story.
Many years ago as a young I.T Engineer i was called out to a small tool hire company in Uxbridge to replace a failed drive in a Windows server, it was a simple Raid 1. It was a stinking hot day in a un-air conditioned office full of accounts staff moaning about the down time and to be honest i was probably in a rush to get back home to continue playing counterstrike (1.6). I pulled the defective drive and installed the new one and in a moment of stupidity rebuilt the raid using the blank drive as master. I didn't realise until i went to boot up the server and the message "insert disk not operating system found" came up, i felt instantly sick. Thank god for tape backups, 6 hours later it was back up and running again but i certainly didn't get any thanks for it, the accounts staff had to stay until the small hours to make up for the 12 hours of missing data :/
Many years ago as a young I.T Engineer i was called out to a small tool hire company in Uxbridge to replace a failed drive in a Windows server, it was a simple Raid 1. It was a stinking hot day in a un-air conditioned office full of accounts staff moaning about the down time and to be honest i was probably in a rush to get back home to continue playing counterstrike (1.6). I pulled the defective drive and installed the new one and in a moment of stupidity rebuilt the raid using the blank drive as master. I didn't realise until i went to boot up the server and the message "insert disk not operating system found" came up, i felt instantly sick. Thank god for tape backups, 6 hours later it was back up and running again but i certainly didn't get any thanks for it, the accounts staff had to stay until the small hours to make up for the 12 hours of missing data :/
Lol seen this before,
Had an ex work boss that rigged up a small freezer set it to its coldest temp then threw the HDD in on extra long cables keeping it just cool enough to allow to recover data off it.