Hard drive failure Options

[jutzy]

Hm, i have a hard drive and for some unknown reason its decided to die...well it is slowly dying.
its about half a year old... and some of my other hard drives are older than that...

what could cause it to fail in such a horrible way.

can i still save it (without the costly repairs)

what happens is ill be doing somthing and it will restart without warning... then it will proceed to tell me that there is a error loading opperating system.

ill power down my rig and then remove the sata plug and replace it back in... then reboot my machine, it then works untill the next crash.

there is no error codes associated with these crashes, just a random reboot.

[priorax]

If it's only half a year old, back it up and RMA it.

If you are overly concerned about backing up data from the drive, make an Ubuntu live CD (the iso can be found on http://www.ubuntu.com/) and copy the files to an alternate location.

If the drive has already failed, there is a re-mixed version of Ubuntu known as the Ubuntu Rescue Remix (http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/). If you don't want to get out of Windows while doing this, GetBackData is a tool I have had to use a few times and is a good one.

While doing recoveries, remember to have enough free space on another disc to accommodate for the data which is recovered.