Another sad day..more like a PO'd day

Well I'm sad,upset and pi##ed off all at the same time.
Came home today from work and found the hard drive with all my Steam stuff had crashed. Lost everything including quite a bit of our personal stuff. Luckily the wife has a lot of it on hers.
I built a new machine and was cleaning the old drive off to use as storage. I put a SSD in the new one for the OS and programs. I was going to move all the data over tonight but that's a bust now.
Here's another good one. My server had it's drives go bad, both of them, about a month ago. (how's that for luck) Bad thing is the server drives was unrecoverable so I'm hoping this one can be recovered. I have two new drives sitting here too. Should have fixed it sooner, and I wouldn't be b##ching about it now.
I feel for you Orph, knowing you just went thru this.

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Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

This is never fun, but why didn't you have a RAID configuration in the server?

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

I used the drive extender feature on WHS. I kept hearing horror stories about using Raid with WHS, so I used that instead.

Unfortunately both drives went at same time. We had either a lightning strike or a power surge because it burned a hole in the insulation and took out the wiring near the ceiling in the GARAGE of all places. Go figure.
[IMG]http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j262/boppa54/Picture.jpg[/IMG]

I've calmed down now. I found most of our own stuff on the wife's comp but all the Steam stuff still bums me out. I don't even mind redoing the maps (might even improve them) but it's all the custom textures and models that I'll miss. And the six months spent on it.

I even have our old golf clubs in the basement so the wife won't go through withdrawals next spring at least.

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Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

I feel for yas bud.
Seems like you lost even more than I did.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

That's because people use the RAID controller built into their boards (it's usually fake raid). With a legit hardware raid controller it's smooth as butter (even with multiple OS' installed)

It also sounds like you need some surge protection.

I would think the thing that'd piss you off the most right now would be the price of HDDs >_>

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Crono said:
It also sounds like you need some surge protection.

I was thinking the same thing. The only reason I didn't say it is because a surge won't stop a lightening strike if its a close one.

I found this out in Jonesboro years ago.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

It sounds like a surge. Obviously there's a hole in his garage from a lightning strike, but I doubt the lightning actually went through his house and struck the computer (more than the HDDs would be dead!)

It could have made a very charged EM field, though, which could have caused the HDD specific failure.

Be interesting to see if the drives themselves are OK through some SMART software, even though the partitions are screwed up.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

LOL, CSI could do it.
They're better than McGyver with HDD's

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Damn, it's always frustrating to have a broken HDD, without even a warning so that you couldn't even make a back-up of a few important things.

It just happens on one of those unlucky days.

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Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/Nibgames

Ahg, sorry to hear that man. One time, we had a lightning strike near my old house when I was a bit younger, and fried both the HDDs in that comp. I was sooo upset that I was willing to spend my savings to have all the info on them recovered through a clean-room process up in Wisconsin I believe. It cost me $300 for each drive (they were 250GB each). But I bought and shipped a new 500GB drive with the two burned ones so that they would recover all the info onto that new one. They're called Gillware, and they made it real easy. They only charge you if they are able to recover the data.

Worked like a charm. I'm just saying it's possible to recover the data if you really want it back and the drives aren't damaged too bad, or if they just suffered an electrical short.

Nowadays, I run three 1Tb drives on an independent RAID controller from Adaptec, in a RAID 5 configuration, so I get about 1.8 TB of space out of it, and my OS drive runs on a Vraptor 300GB where just the program-installs are placed. As for surge protection, I can't afford a battery surge protector that protects 1000 watts (My comp runs on a 850 Watt PSU) so I bought a 400 watt battery surge protector and just hook up the backup external drive to it. That's my protection now. Although nothing has happened in the past 2.5 years to challenge the system except for the occasional power outage. (School campus power is the Sux0rz)

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

Good to hear that back then you managed to get your files back Riven. It's good that they don't charge you if you cannot manage to get your files back. Otherwise It would be a great risk and may be a money waste if no files can be recovered.

If he insists on it, perhaps it'll work for sgtfly as well.

Edit: This reminds me when I formatted my hard drive, but forgot to save my first Source map on a USB drive. It wasn't finished yet, but it was a map of my house up until the second-last floor.

Of course, I am only talking about one file now.

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Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/Nibgames

Hard drives do give warnings when they're going to die. People either don't notice it (or ignore it) or windows ignores it (you have to explicitly check through third party software)

The base SMART reading you get in the load up screen (OK/FAIL) is bare minimum. If you want to keep an eye on how a HDD is doing, load up a proper SMART utility (make sure SMART is actually on in BIOS also) and check the number of failed reads and writes.

Unless it's a freak accident.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Well, both server drives are unsalvageable, nothing to had off them.
The other drive is being looked at tonite, hopefully he'll have better news tomorrow.
That's the only place I didn't have a surge protector. I'm having one installed in the main panel soon so the whole house is protected. This isn't the first time we've had this happen, about four years ago we lost 2 tv's all the cable boxes, router, modem, 1 computer and the wifes coffee maker to a strike close by.

Crono I think I'm gonna get a raid card like you said and try that, though it wouldn't have helped with server it might on the other. Though I am running an SSD drive, I'm not sure how it will like a raid config.

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Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

WOOHOO!!!!!
Well I got most of the data today from the drive. Not all of it but more than I expected. Most of my personal stuff, photoshop, modo, a couple other things and some of the steam stuff. (I did lose a couple maps an a lot of textures but that's ok.)
I didn't really need anything else off it so I'm happy with what I got.

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Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

Now that is good to hear! Remember not to lose hope whenever something like this happens again. (Or actually, never lose hope in any case ).

Must've felt great when you realized most files could be recovered!

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Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/Nibgames

I suggest you get a lightning rod to redirect those strikes away from your house. Or at least your electrical systems.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

You know it's funny...or not, but I seem to attract lightning. Over the years I've been close to several strikes.
First time I remember was as a kid on our bikes going home and one struck a flag pole as we were going by. The next time I was in the squad car and one hit a transformer on a utility pole next to car and blew, it blinded me for a few seconds, at 50 mph that was fun. The third time I was working a football game and it struck the scoreboard when I was about 50 feet away. The time before the last it fried a bunch of stuff at home, then this last when it hit and tried to burn the garage down.
Maybe I should attach one to myself too.

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Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

Haha that would look silly.

No but really, that is a lot of times indeed.
Perhaps you are Raiden from Mortal Kombat:

http://www.mortalkombatinfo.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Raiden_Render1.jpg

Don't know but that is what came to my mind first.

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Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/Nibgames