I am currently pulling off as much data as possible from a hard drive that has the potential to fail anytime. I was able to pull a Windows backup from it yesterday, and today I am pulling off whatever data I can in its current state. In doing so, I have a backup file I can restore from and can access the data immediately if its needed.
The drive is suprisingly still running, but I believe that is because I have it on its side as opposed to laying flat in the external enclosure we have. The drive currently sounds like this when it accesses certain parts of the drive. It also sounds like this when laying flat. A 2.5″ laptop hard drive should not sound like that at all.
I am currently running WinMerge on the source and destination directories just to make sure that I have everything copied. WinMerge is a GUI diff utility for Windows. Diff is a command-line tool in Linux and UNIX, and it is most useful in comparing the changes in files and directories. In my case here, I am using it to compare the original directories with the backup copy, ensuring that I have all the folders and files I should have.
The replacement drive is on its way, but it is due to arrive by Friday. I will spend most of my day–if not all day–rebuilding the laptop. All should be well, but when I was requesting the drive from Dell Technical Support he asked me if the bottom of the laptop–a Latitude D400–had all of the rubber feet. All of the Dell D series laptops have rubber feet to raise the laptop off of a surface and help keep it cool. Of course, the rubber feet have been known to come off. I had the same problem with my D600 when I worked at UMD. Coincidentally, the laptop in question was missing a foot from the corner of the laptop where the hard drive is seated. The tech seems to think that contributed to the drive failure as the area of the laptop chassis that held the hard drive was subject to more stress than expected.
#1 by Mike on January 27, 2006 - 9:01 pm UTC
BTW, a computer that can fail because it doesn’t have it’s little rubber feet is a shitty computer. Even worse that they know about it and don’t seem to care. Couldn’t they send out lots of extra little rubber feet?
#2 by Jason J. Thomas on January 30, 2006 - 10:14 am UTC
Well, I have to agree with you completely. It is just a bit too odd that this sort of happened that way, and the question asked was “Are you missing one of the rubber feet?” Just plain shitty.