Help! - I think Eraser killed my hard drive??

H

harddrivecrashed

New Member
Hello, I'm hoping someone can help. I have a dell with two 250GB hard drives set up in a RAID system. It's not the duplicating kind, it's the kind where data is split between the drives. I installed eraser and ran it to erase data from the recycling bins and unused space on my two partitions, C: (system) and D: (file storage). I got some errors from Eraser that some things couldn't be erased (sorry, I can't remember what it said, it was about a week ago). Since then, my computer would freeze up unexpectedly, or when starting Windows 7, it would tell me that Windows didn't start normally the previous time.
In any case, I booted my computer yesterday, and the Dell bios said that the RAID stripe was normal, but reported an error to one of the drives. I ran a diagnostic and got Dell error code 7: not able to read.
I can't get my computer to boot and I'm afraid I may have lost some important family photos. I'm at my wits end... I can't get the drive to boot, it always has an error in the BIOS startup.
I'm not sure if this was caused by Eraser or not, but if anyone has advice of how I can get my drive to work, I would appreciate it!
I thought maybe the drive was having a hardware failure, so I left it outside overnight (I live in MN, and the temperature today was 4 degrees F) because people said if you freeze a malfunctioning hard drive it might work long enough to get files off. I reconnected it (it's sitting in a Ziploc bag and in a bath of ice and saltwater to keep it cold right now). That hasn't helped. The plates are spinning for sure - I can hear them.

Am I just out of luck, or what?

Thanks for your help!

Rob
 
It sounds like a dead drive, definitely -- you could say that Eraser was the cause (as Eraser places a lot of stress on the hard drive) and may expedite the failure of a hard disk on the verge of failing. But it doesn't sound like it was corrupted due to Eraser. I don't think there's anything you can do now except perhaps hire a data recovery company to extricate what's left of your disk. I wouldn't freeze the drive if I were you though, those electronics can't take temperature extremes... How old are the drives? If they are relatively aged perhaps you should have replaced them earlier...
 
Joel said:
How old are the drives? If they are relatively aged perhaps you should have replaced them earlier...
Click to expand...
Cold comfort, Joel! Sadly, there isn't much comfort one can offer in a situation such as this. You are almost certainly dealing with physical failure; even if it's file system corruption, the fact that it's a RAID array makes recovery that much more difficult. For the future, the advice to SOHO users is to steer clear of RAID if at all possible; separate hard drives and properly automated backup software provide an easier and almost certainly safer option.

David
 
Definitely, unless you really know what you're doing... or you have a lot of money to splurge on expensive RAID-5/RAID-6 arrays. :P
 
Thanks everyone for your thoughts on this, I REALLY appreciate it! I agree, in hindsight Eraser probably didn't cause the problem, but could have pushed my already close-to-failing hard drive over the edge. I went against my better judgement when I decided to stick with the RAID 0 option. It's my own fault for not backing up more often. Luckily, I DID back up the photos of my son's birth (THANK GOODNESS - I'd never be able to live with myself if I lost those), but I lost some pictures from the last 3 months.

Ugh.

So last night, after hopelessly trying to get the drive to work, I finally laid it to rest at about 11:30pm last night. RIP, WD Caviar 250GB, we hardly knew ye.

P.S. If you're reading this right now, GO BACK UP YOUR IMPORTANT FILES!
 
harddrivecrashed said:
Thanks everyone for your thoughts on this, I REALLY appreciate it! I agree, in hindsight Eraser probably didn't cause the problem, but could have pushed my already close-to-failing hard drive over the edge. I went against my better judgement when I decided to stick with the RAID 0 option. It's my own fault for not backing up more often. Luckily, I DID back up the photos of my son's birth (THANK GOODNESS - I'd never be able to live with myself if I lost those), but I lost some pictures from the last 3 months.

Ugh.

So last night, after hopelessly trying to get the drive to work, I finally laid it to rest at about 11:30pm last night. RIP, WD Caviar 250GB, we hardly knew ye.

P.S. If you're reading this right now, GO BACK UP YOUR IMPORTANT FILES!
Click to expand...

Hey "harddrivecrashed" You might be able to recover your photos...
Re: your post on "Thu Jan 28, 2010 9:02 pm", I hope you are able to read this...

You may be able to recover your photos easily and for free - download a file recovery program called "Diskdigger" freeware. Read review:
http://www.brighthub.com/computing/smb- ... 43593.aspx
and download from:
http://download.cnet.com/DiskDigger/300 ... ?tag=mncol
 
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