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Does having files on the Desktop slow down a computer?
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macgyver655




Joined: 22 Aug 2007
Posts: 8508



PostLink    Posted: Wed Jan 19, 2011 9:09 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote


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You guys seem to forget that I have seen this stuff with my own eyes. And after 12 years of this stuff its not like I dont have a clue, or haven't tried tens if not hundreds of various software to recover stuff after failures. I have changed drive circuit boards and even drive platters. Some successful... some not. I have seen many sad faces after being told that all their stuff is gone and not recoverable.

I have learned that there can always be that scenario where no software can recover your stuff. So your better off trying the best you can to secure your stuff in case that dreaded monster appears. Burning is the best. Second partition is second best under the easiest category. Second drive or external drive is also good but more complicated for most consumers or not always an option.

Everybody can do as they wish as everything in this thread is only suggestions. All I know is almost all my data is secure. I have multiple redundant backup.
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phishin_ca




Joined: 17 Mar 2009
Posts: 64
Location: Salisbury, MD


PostLink    Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2011 2:25 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Just curious, what is this $800 software? What I use cost about 10k Wink
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phishin_ca




Joined: 17 Mar 2009
Posts: 64
Location: Salisbury, MD


PostLink    Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2011 2:28 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

macgyver655 wrote:
ecrabb wrote:
macgyver655 wrote:
What if your C drive is corrupt (which I have seen on many, many, many occasions) and not even recognized?

Mac, are you suggesting that it's much more likely that Windows will corrupt it's own boot partition, and unlikely it will corrupt other mounted non-boot partitions?

To use your favorite utterance, hmmmmmm....

Wink

SC


I'm not suggesting it.... I'm saying it!!!!!!! Well not more then likely........ more like..It is possible.

As I said, I even had a HD recently (about 3 months ago)where it would not load up. Tried a repair with the disk....no go. Pulled the drive and connected to another PC...would not show C. E and F were there as I had partitioned this drive originally. Put drive back in original PC and loaded up a virtual windows....no C.

Restarted PC to do a reinstall. Partitions showed a blank where C was and showed E and F.
Repartitioned the blank, formatted and installed a fresh copy. When it was all said and done I had a fresh OS and all the stuff that was on E and F was fully intact. And that folder in the E drive that was drivers and software was just sitting there waiting for me to install. Very Happy


This is usually a bad partition table. Usually caused by a bad magic number on a dynamic partition (don't use them). It could have been fixed in about 5 minutes with winhex.
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phishin_ca




Joined: 17 Mar 2009
Posts: 64
Location: Salisbury, MD


PostLink    Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2011 2:31 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

macgyver655 wrote:
drive platters. Some successful... some not. I have seen many sad faces after being told that all their stuff is gone and not recoverable.


What type of disk? Short of a seized spindle or motor failure, there is no need to ever remove the platter. 99% of the time it will fail.
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Nashou66




Joined: 12 Jan 2007
Posts: 16171
Location: West Seneca NY


PostLink    Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2011 2:47 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Not to hijack this thread, any luck finding a donor drive for my problem?

Athanasios

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phishin_ca




Joined: 17 Mar 2009
Posts: 64
Location: Salisbury, MD


PostLink    Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2011 2:53 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Nothing close. It is the major problem with apple drives. They have a custom firmware on the seagate disks and follow very small lot numbers. I have it up in the tracker and it it is at the front of my mind.
Shawn
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Nashou66




Joined: 12 Jan 2007
Posts: 16171
Location: West Seneca NY


PostLink    Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2011 3:00 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks, I have been looking on E-bay as well but no luck.

Athanasios

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ecrabb
Forum Moderator



Joined: 13 Mar 2006
Posts: 15909
Location: Utah

TV/Projector: JVC RS40, Epson 5010


PostLink    Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2011 3:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Jog my memory, Athanasios... What's the deal?

SC
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phishin_ca




Joined: 17 Mar 2009
Posts: 64
Location: Salisbury, MD


PostLink    Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2011 3:10 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

To put it out here as well.. who knows what other people can find. We are looking for
seagate ST3160023AS
Site Code: WU (must match)
Firmware: 3.42 (must match)
P/N: 9W2814-242 (must match)
Date Code: 05447 (as close as possible)
Config PFV-02 (prefer match)
HDA P/N 100332816 (prefer match)


It must be a working drive, and it can't be a refurb(green border)...


Last edited by phishin_ca on Tue Jan 25, 2011 5:03 am; edited 1 time in total
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macgyver655




Joined: 22 Aug 2007
Posts: 8508



PostLink    Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2011 3:12 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

phishin_ca wrote:
macgyver655 wrote:
drive platters. Some successful... some not. I have seen many sad faces after being told that all their stuff is gone and not recoverable.


What type of disk? Short of a seized spindle or motor failure, there is no need to ever remove the platter. 99% of the time it will fail.


I dont know what kind of a response your looking for here phishin_ca. I've said what I said very clearly and I've done what I've said. Not much more to it then that! And this applies to the other quotes of mine you quoted.
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phishin_ca




Joined: 17 Mar 2009
Posts: 64
Location: Salisbury, MD


PostLink    Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2011 3:19 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Just like everything else, I collect information. If there is software I have not seen or used, I am interested. If there drives that are less susceptible to concentricity issues in regards to platter removal, I am interested. It was more of a request for information.
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Nashou66




Joined: 12 Jan 2007
Posts: 16171
Location: West Seneca NY


PostLink    Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2011 3:27 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

ecrabb wrote:
Jog my memory, Athanasios... What's the deal?

SC


My Sisters HD went kaput. She had a grease fire in her kitchen and I think the smoke might have damaged it.
From What shawn told me the drive reading heads are shot. So a donor drive is needed to try to recover thousands of photos.

it was an old thread and Shawn PMed with an offer to look at it.

So looking for a drive with all the info he posted above.

The Local Apple repair shop also said it was not recoverable with out
trying to move parts from one drive to the other and it was beyond what he does.


Thanks for posting the drive info Shawn.


Athanasios

_________________
Don't blame your underwear for your crooked ass~ unknown Greek philosopher


"Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the Democrats believe every day is April 15." --- President Reagan

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phishin_ca




Joined: 17 Mar 2009
Posts: 64
Location: Salisbury, MD


PostLink    Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2011 3:44 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

The nightmare is in finding a donor. I think I may have had a total of 5 apple drives come through in the past year.
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ecrabb
Forum Moderator



Joined: 13 Mar 2006
Posts: 15909
Location: Utah

TV/Projector: JVC RS40, Epson 5010


PostLink    Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2011 4:15 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

What machine did it come out of? Considering what's at stake (thousands of photos), and the relative rarity of drive pulls from Macs, it might be much, much easier to find an identical Mac of the same vintage... It would likely use the same mechanism, then you could use the drive as a donor. When you're all finished, slap a different drive into the donor Mac and re-sell - perhaps at very little loss other than what the drive cost and the time to screw around with it all.

So... I'm curious... And I'm honestly not trying to be an ass, here... How does the smoke from a grease fire damage the read heads in a hermetically-sealed drive mechanism? Isn't it much more likely that the grease fire smoke (if anything) merely damaged the controller board on the drive? Even more likely than that I would think, is that the drive simply died like many drives do, and that it happened to roughly coincide with the grease fire. Just sayin'.

SC
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Nashou66




Joined: 12 Jan 2007
Posts: 16171
Location: West Seneca NY


PostLink    Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2011 4:21 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

it was just my theory Steve. But Shawn explained that the drives of that vintage had issues. bad read heads that failed regularly.

I just remembered that now. Id try to find a used mac of that vintage but trying to get a seller to open it up and make sure the drive has the same data is unreasonable i'd think.

Oh and it came out of a 17' iMac G5

Athanasios

_________________
Don't blame your underwear for your crooked ass~ unknown Greek philosopher


"Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the Democrats believe every day is April 15." --- President Reagan

One Smart Dog!!!

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phishin_ca




Joined: 17 Mar 2009
Posts: 64
Location: Salisbury, MD


PostLink    Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2011 4:26 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

ecrabb wrote:
What machine did it come out of? Considering what's at stake (thousands of photos), and the relative rarity of drive pulls from Macs, it might be much, much easier to find an identical Mac of the same vintage... It would likely use the same mechanism, then you could use the drive as a donor. When you're all finished, slap a different drive into the donor Mac and re-sell - perhaps at very little loss other than what the drive cost and the time to screw around with it all.

So... I'm curious... And I'm honestly not trying to be an ass, here... How does the smoke from a grease fire damage the read heads in a hermetically-sealed drive mechanism? Isn't it much more likely that the grease fire smoke (if anything) merely damaged the controller board on the drive? Even more likely than that I would think, is that the drive simply died like many drives do, and that it happened to roughly coincide with the grease fire. Just sayin'.

SC

#1 is not a viable option as Seagate uses multiple factories and multiple lots of preamplifiers at each. Even if the heads are mechanically and electrically the same, one of the first functions on boot is to query the preamp ID. If it does not match it will not continue. That is why the matching of the items becomes so important. You can have 5 iMacs built on the same day that each have radically different hardware when we are looking at that level.

It is not my feeling that smoke was the cause, I am thinking more of a coincidence. The drives are not actually sealed, there is a breather hole and a filter. WD drives actually have multiple filters. The controller board, would be a perfectly easy repair, unfortunately it functions as intended and provides further firmware based diagnostics that show the head problem specifically.
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phishin_ca




Joined: 17 Mar 2009
Posts: 64
Location: Salisbury, MD


PostLink    Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2011 4:46 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Seagate has 3 factories that put out this drive; WU,TK, and AMK. There are also at least 5 different F/W revisions found on the model. That could be a whole lot of wrong tries. We definitely need to hunt for the donor based on specs. I have even seend WD drives in the iMac.
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ecrabb
Forum Moderator



Joined: 13 Mar 2006
Posts: 15909
Location: Utah

TV/Projector: JVC RS40, Epson 5010


PostLink    Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2011 4:49 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

phishin_ca wrote:
#1 is not a viable option as Seagate uses multiple factories and multiple lots of preamplifiers at each. Even if the heads are mechanically and electrically the same, one of the first functions on boot is to query the preamp ID. If it does not match it will not continue. That is why the matching of the items becomes so important. You can have 5 iMacs built on the same day that each have radically different hardware when we are looking at that level.


OK, I have to say it makes absolutely zero sense to me that five identical mechanisms from the same manufacturer lot would have incompatible components... But, since you obviously know more about it than I do, I'll have to take your word for it.

Regardless... If that is true, and given the relative rarity of drive pulls from Macs, IMHO the chances of finding a computer with a compatible donor drive - while certainly not foolproof - would be infinitely better than finding exactly the loose drive you need... That is unless you know somebody in the business of refurbishing school Macs or something that sees dozens of them a week and would be willing to try to find what you need... Because I think finding the matching bare drive would be like finding a needle in a haystack... Even more so if what you're saying about preamp IDs is true.

It looks like 17" iMac G5's go for around $200-250 on fleabay... That's chump change if you ask me to (potentially) be able to save thousands of photos - especially if you can re-use or re-sell the machine when you're finished. At worst, you eat some shipping buying and selling a few iMacs. Heck, if a guy was careful and bought low and sold high, you might not even lose anything but a little time.

Cheers,
SC
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ecrabb
Forum Moderator



Joined: 13 Mar 2006
Posts: 15909
Location: Utah

TV/Projector: JVC RS40, Epson 5010


PostLink    Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2011 4:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

phishin_ca wrote:
I have even seend WD drives in the iMac.

Sure, in a different model revision or a different drive size... But, I'd bet money that every iMac G5 of that model rev with a 160GB drive in it was a ST3160023AS...

SC
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phishin_ca




Joined: 17 Mar 2009
Posts: 64
Location: Salisbury, MD


PostLink    Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2011 4:57 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I will definitely agree with the fact that buying and selling a few of them we have a chance of finding the correct disk.
When we start talking about the obscurity:
The head assemblies are built separate and used between multiple models. They can sit in inventory for days, or weeks.
The drives are then assembled with those assemblies and have a selfscan performed.
The drive can start out as a 160GB drive, fail on one head and be sold as an 80GB.
The three factories churn out the mass of drives to fill orders.
the order in which the drives are pulled for assembly into machines can vary.
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