Project88
Established Member
1 - Back up your hard drive
2 - If your hard drive stops working, no matter how tempting they might look, don't undo those screws holding the top on it
No sympathy expected, but wanted to share my sad tell to help prevent the same happening to you.
After 7 years of unreasonably reliable service my hard drive just went bang. PC froze, I turned it off, then when I turned it back on the hard drive was making an awful mechanical clicking (gear teeth clicking over each other type of sound). The screen announced a helpful message, something like, the hard drive is not found, insert system disk. Oh my goodness I thought, well something like that anyway :evil:
So, being an engineer I had no choice but to dive in with the screw driver. Sounds mechanical I thought I can fix that. What pitiful defences against my attack, I thought as I undid the tiny torx screws, two of which hidden under the makers label (Western Digital). As the top came off, I admired myself in the gleaming mirrored faces of the disks inside, ha this shouldn't take long Even took time to show off the success to my dearest.
When inside there was no obvious gearbox to persuade into mesh :? So I thought I would get out the old laptop (wot I am using now) and Google it. Some minutes later the full extent of the error of my ways hit me. Consistent advice was never, never, never open the hard drive box; they are assembled in a clean room for a reason. The drive head skims over the disk with a clearance of about a micron and even cigarette smoke landing on the face of the disk will cause failure. Hmm I thought thats why the disk face looked so nice and shiny :roll: I looked again at the exposed disk face now along side me on the desk top, it looked like it had attracted every loose fibre from every carpet in the house. As I drew breath to blow them off I realised that this was not going to help. If it wasn't dead before it certainly was now
As the time has passed the extent of the situation has sunk home. Dozen's of woodworking pdf files down loaded, now lost.
Hundreds of web address book marked, now lost.
goodness knows how many useful, helpful, important emails; all gone.
All those applications installed and tweaked; have to start all over again.
All of that is annoying, but the worst of it is about 4 years of family photos, not printed off, lost forever.
So, go out and treat yourself to an external hard drive and do a back up. If nothing else it would be some consolation if others could benefit from my errors.
Cheers,
John.
2 - If your hard drive stops working, no matter how tempting they might look, don't undo those screws holding the top on it
No sympathy expected, but wanted to share my sad tell to help prevent the same happening to you.
After 7 years of unreasonably reliable service my hard drive just went bang. PC froze, I turned it off, then when I turned it back on the hard drive was making an awful mechanical clicking (gear teeth clicking over each other type of sound). The screen announced a helpful message, something like, the hard drive is not found, insert system disk. Oh my goodness I thought, well something like that anyway :evil:
So, being an engineer I had no choice but to dive in with the screw driver. Sounds mechanical I thought I can fix that. What pitiful defences against my attack, I thought as I undid the tiny torx screws, two of which hidden under the makers label (Western Digital). As the top came off, I admired myself in the gleaming mirrored faces of the disks inside, ha this shouldn't take long
Even took time to show off the success to my dearest. When inside there was no obvious gearbox to persuade into mesh :? So I thought I would get out the old laptop (wot I am using now) and Google it. Some minutes later the full extent of the error of my ways hit me. Consistent advice was never, never, never open the hard drive box; they are assembled in a clean room for a reason. The drive head skims over the disk with a clearance of about a micron and even cigarette smoke landing on the face of the disk will cause failure. Hmm I thought thats why the disk face looked so nice and shiny :roll: I looked again at the exposed disk face now along side me on the desk top, it looked like it had attracted every loose fibre from every carpet in the house. As I drew breath to blow them off I realised that this was not going to help. If it wasn't dead before it certainly was now
As the time has passed the extent of the situation has sunk home. Dozen's of woodworking pdf files down loaded, now lost.
Hundreds of web address book marked, now lost.
goodness knows how many useful, helpful, important emails; all gone.
All those applications installed and tweaked; have to start all over again.
All of that is annoying, but the worst of it is about 4 years of family photos, not printed off, lost forever.
So, go out and treat yourself to an external hard drive and do a back up. If nothing else it would be some consolation if others could benefit from my errors.
Cheers,
John.
