Disk and Site
Just a quick update, for anybody not reading the comments… I didn’t do anything about my hard drive because the answer I get from most people, actually from everybody except those on one forum (who have suggested getting and running HDD Regenerator or SpinRite), seems too risky…
They’re saying that with such symptoms the best thing to do would be to put it in an airtight bag and stick it in the freezer for several hours or a full day, then connect it immediately and, if it works, grab the most important things as fast as I can, since the method usually works for any mechanical failure but the breaking of the read head, but it usually only works as long as the drive is cold, so it will most likely lock again when it will warm up.
I heard of the solution before, I looked into it now too and what discussions I found on the topic conclude that it does indeed work for a limited time in case of any mechanical failure but the breaking of the read head. As for what “limited time” means, I saw anything between two minutes and one week, but usually it’s under one hour. Actually what I found most frequently was that people were able to recover 30-40 Gb of data off a failed drive that was frozen like this before it failed again. Since what I really need is likely little over 300 Mb and all I really want back is around 1 Gb put together, plus that I won’t even have anywhere to put more than 10-12 Gb, it seems a good idea, but… Sticking a component in the freezer and then connecting it immediately? Sounds crazy to me! I think I’ll only resort to it if nobody will convince me that a software solution could solve the problem for long enough to recover what I want to recover…
Oh yeah, since I forgot to mention in the previous post, don’t tell me about professional data recovery services, no way I could afford that and wouldn’t have people snoop through it, especially if told exactly what I need back most, even if I could…
On another note, yes, I know my recent comments plugin causes errors since I upgraded to 2.3… I don’t want to deactivate it and I’m really in no mood to look for one that’ll work now. If you send a comment and get an error saying that headers have already been sent by recentcomments.php, know that your comment has been posted. If you want to be sure you can copy it before sending it, then hit back and refresh the page. In case it somehow didn’t post you can then try pasting and sending again, but that shouldn’t be the case.
