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I have learned two things today:
1) A really good way to slowly defrost a bag of minced beef is on top of an overheating hard drive.
2) A really good way to keep a failing hard drive running long enough to migrate your data is with a bag of frozen mince.
I was brought an iMac to fix and upgrade. I eventually managed to get all the customer's information off the original WD 250GB hard drive. I couldn't do this with a drive imager as it wouldn't run for long enough. The hard drive would only run for 25 minutes or so before clicking and spinning down. It would then come back to life for increasingly short periods. I soon discovered that giving it a rest to cool down, would give me a longer burst of data recovery.
Having got the data safe, I tried some drive utility software to see if the drive data structure could be repaired. It came as no surprise that it couldn't as what was clearly a thermal/mechanical fault had caused the drive corruption.
I fitted a new drive and installed a fresh OS and a bit more RAM for good measure. As the rescued data was just copied, it was not seen as a valid OS with valid users by Migration Assistant. I was either going to spend many hours cobbling all the applications and user information into the right places or find a way to make the original drive run continuously for 3 hours or so. That's where the frozen mince came in. I protected the drive with a plastic sheet and turned the bag of m round regularly to a fresh cold patch. The drive data all migrated perfectly.
Not only was the repair a success, the "spag bol" was excellent.
Martin
1) A really good way to slowly defrost a bag of minced beef is on top of an overheating hard drive.
2) A really good way to keep a failing hard drive running long enough to migrate your data is with a bag of frozen mince.
I was brought an iMac to fix and upgrade. I eventually managed to get all the customer's information off the original WD 250GB hard drive. I couldn't do this with a drive imager as it wouldn't run for long enough. The hard drive would only run for 25 minutes or so before clicking and spinning down. It would then come back to life for increasingly short periods. I soon discovered that giving it a rest to cool down, would give me a longer burst of data recovery.
Having got the data safe, I tried some drive utility software to see if the drive data structure could be repaired. It came as no surprise that it couldn't as what was clearly a thermal/mechanical fault had caused the drive corruption.
I fitted a new drive and installed a fresh OS and a bit more RAM for good measure. As the rescued data was just copied, it was not seen as a valid OS with valid users by Migration Assistant. I was either going to spend many hours cobbling all the applications and user information into the right places or find a way to make the original drive run continuously for 3 hours or so. That's where the frozen mince came in. I protected the drive with a plastic sheet and turned the bag of m round regularly to a fresh cold patch. The drive data all migrated perfectly.
Not only was the repair a success, the "spag bol" was excellent.
Martin
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