Post-apocalyptic backup system
Jan. 17th, 2010 03:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidnI don't know what it is about the last week, but everyone's computers seem to be failing in one way or another. Mine got progressively worse over a couple of days, first appearing to be suffering from a dying graphics card, then a dodgy motherboard, and then the hard drive eventually deciding that it wasn't going to spin correctly when I attempted to rescue it.
Despite that evening's conclusive awfulness I couldn't leave the hard drive alone in the morning, and needed to have one last try at trying to bring it back to life. Starting it up in the external enclosure again just gave what we'd heard before - a promising spinning-up start followed by a cutting out noise and then multiple sort of pathetic revs as it tried its best to get going. So thinking I had nothing to lose, I went with something that Whitney had suggested the night before and that I'd never thought would work, MacGyvering together this ramshackle arrangement.
What you're looking at there is the hard drive running independently of any kind of case, powered by the power supply unit in the otherwise pretty dead desktop it's sitting on. Attached to it is the interface ripped out of the external drive enclosure, which is still powered by the enclosure's own cable to get the USB working. I thought the best that I could hope for with the combination was a sizeable explosion, but on turning it on it certainly sounded a lot healthier than it had before, and when it was connected up to the laptop, the drive was recognized as intact. So as quickly as possible I added a couple of other things to complete the post-apocalyptic backup system:
From a hard drive powered from the dead computer, through a virtual sort of USB drive enclosure, into the laptop, then into a more traditionally-powered external drive. And using that arrangement I managed to get the really important stuff off it - the My Documents and MMF2 folders, Modplug, and so on - before the desktop cut out with a CPU overheating alarm. It turned out that this was just from a stray IDE cable physically blocking the fan.
It looks like I certainly picked the right time to upgrade, and even though I'm not now convinced that there's anything fatally wrong with the old hard drive after all, I'll be using a new one and backing up much more often from now on. And the fan interference is certainly a sign that it's wise to get a new and bigger case.
Despite that evening's conclusive awfulness I couldn't leave the hard drive alone in the morning, and needed to have one last try at trying to bring it back to life. Starting it up in the external enclosure again just gave what we'd heard before - a promising spinning-up start followed by a cutting out noise and then multiple sort of pathetic revs as it tried its best to get going. So thinking I had nothing to lose, I went with something that Whitney had suggested the night before and that I'd never thought would work, MacGyvering together this ramshackle arrangement.
What you're looking at there is the hard drive running independently of any kind of case, powered by the power supply unit in the otherwise pretty dead desktop it's sitting on. Attached to it is the interface ripped out of the external drive enclosure, which is still powered by the enclosure's own cable to get the USB working. I thought the best that I could hope for with the combination was a sizeable explosion, but on turning it on it certainly sounded a lot healthier than it had before, and when it was connected up to the laptop, the drive was recognized as intact. So as quickly as possible I added a couple of other things to complete the post-apocalyptic backup system:
From a hard drive powered from the dead computer, through a virtual sort of USB drive enclosure, into the laptop, then into a more traditionally-powered external drive. And using that arrangement I managed to get the really important stuff off it - the My Documents and MMF2 folders, Modplug, and so on - before the desktop cut out with a CPU overheating alarm. It turned out that this was just from a stray IDE cable physically blocking the fan.
It looks like I certainly picked the right time to upgrade, and even though I'm not now convinced that there's anything fatally wrong with the old hard drive after all, I'll be using a new one and backing up much more often from now on. And the fan interference is certainly a sign that it's wise to get a new and bigger case.
From Mwyann
Date: 2010-01-19 06:17 pm (UTC)Re: From Mwyann
Date: 2010-01-19 06:18 pm (UTC)