For the last ten years or so I've been a member of an "Amateur Press Association" (APA) called Point of Divergence. An APA is basically a bunch of people with a common interest who write 'zines' on that interest, then send them to a central mailer to be sent out to the group. Point of Divergence is an APA for writers of Alternate History stories and essays. Early last month I was getting ready for the 50th issue of the APA. I wanted to do something special to mark the 50th aniversary, so I decided to shoot for a 50 page zine--much larger than the normal ones I do for the APA. I worked hard and had about 40 of the 50 pages done. Then fate intervened. Actually, one of our cats intervened. As I worked,, one of our three cats stepped on the switch to the outlet strip the computer is hooked up to. He didn't throw the switch into the off position. He just moved it enough to make the power go off for a split second, then come back on. Unfortunately, that split second must have come at a bad time for the hard drive.
At first the problem didn't seem too bad. I lost half an hour to an hour's work because for some reason autobackup didn't pick up. I said "Oh well" and just kept going. Then the real disaster started. The hard drive started going bad, but not in an obvious way. The computer slowed to an agonizing crawl, and then slowed down even more, to the point where nothing was happening at all. The hard drive worked just enough to tantalize me for several hours, getting into Windows a couple of times before freezing.
Finally it stopped booting. I have a dual boot Windows/Linux system and it stopped with an error message just before I was supposed to choose Linux or Windows. Then came the real disaster. I decided to reinstall Linux, thinking that the cat problem had corrupted the drive locally in the Linux/Windows choice program.
Well, I went through the Linux install and tried to reboot. Nothing. Not only that, but I found out later that instead of reinstalling on my internal drive it repartitioned my external backup drive, wiping out my backup, and turning the loss of maybe a couple of hours worth of work into the loss of everything I did for eight days—everything I had for the zine.
So, back to the drawing board. First I had to get the computer working. I tried a spare disk I had laying around. Couldn't get it to work at all in several hours of trying. Finally I ran out and bought a new drive. Had trouble even there. The software on the CD that came with the drive wouldn't recognize it. Fortunately I had an earlier revision of the software from a drive I bought from the same company earlier. It worked. I spent several hours getting the drive formatted, Windows installed, drivers hunted up (this is a system I built myself, so I had to hunt down all of the driver disks), and enough software installed to get the computer minimally functional. Loads of fun. Actually, very time-consuming. I then spent several hours trying to recover the lost information on the backup hard drive. No luck at all on that front with the standard tools. Finally I gave up and redid the zine almost from scratch.
After I finished the zine I did find a way to get back most of the lost data. It involved buying a computer forensics program and doing quite a few other things that require quite a bit of computer knowledge. Not for the faint of heart. It probably wasn't worth the time and money I spent to get the stuff back. I'll probably be able to use the program when my students lose data though, so it is all good. By the way, based on this program I would say that it is very difficult to actually delete info from a computer drive to the point that someone with the right software and knowledge couldn't get it back. I got back data where the file was deleted and the disk formatted and set up for a different operating system. Might want to keep that in mind if you are getting rid of a computer and have something confidential on the hard drive.
In any case, the cats don't understand why I don't let them anywhere near the computer anymore. You may be wondering why the one cat is still alive. I'm a very patient person, though this little incident really tried that patience.
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Comments: 9
My cat doesn't get close to the computers. He prefers to throw up on the carpet, generally right where I'm about to step.
I think the sounds the 'puter makes kinda freak him out......maybe to the point of puking on the carpet right where I'm about to step.
But, I digress...anyway, I have built computers a number of times. The proprietary crapola that so much hardware and software have built in is just...well...as you can attest, it's just a nightmare.
I finally bought one, off the shelf, about 3 years ago. It's had two problems. One a MAJOR virus we could not get rid of. That's the first time I called the Geek Squad. After a two-day stay in computer ICU, it came out clean and hasn't fallen off the wagon since. The second time was a bad p/s, and truthfully I could have changed it myself, but for a labor charge of $99 I let the little geeky guy come out and not only install the p/s, but he cleaned the 'puter inside and out!
It's like oil changes, I'll never do another of my own again.
Many things I'll pay someone else to do. It's so worth the money if I don't have to put up with the aggravation.
Know anyone who cleans cat vomit for a good price?
The front of my tower is of great interest to the grandbaby. It has been baby proofed, though I'm not sure if those measures will survive toddler stage. grin
Glad you got it all worked out Dale. I know what computer parts look like, beyond that what to do with and to them is DH job.
This same thing happened to me! Well...not exactly, I didn't have all the computer problems after. The cat kept stepping on the power strip at inopportune moments. I really think she did it on purpose for ignoring her. So I asked my husband to make me a box to cover the thing. The box sits flush with the floor and has slots on the top just big enough for the plugs to fit through. He put another slot on the end for the power strip cord. Haven't had any problems since except the cat keeps trying to get under the box.
Oh...when I'm done with a hard-drive I remove it from the tower. I smash it to bits with a sledgehammer until it's no longer recognizable!
Sorry C.A...can't help you with the puke thing.
On a related topic: one time the cat stepped on my phone and speed-dialled (long distance) at 3 a.m.--friends were confused but accepted apologies (from me, not from cat).
Dale, you have more patience than I'd ever have. Would have taken the computer in first thing. Well... I take that back. I probably would have wasted a few hours trying to figure out what was wrong--I hate to be defeated by hardware. But then I would've sought ought the pros. Good for you, that you could do it yourself.
I think that you can download utilities from most hard disk drive manufacturers' web sites that allow you to perform a low-level format of a hard drive; however, this is not something that most people should be doing, as you can easily render a drive completely useless if you don't enter in the proper information.
To wipe out a hard drive so that the data cannot be easily recovered by people with the right tools/knowledge, it's best to use a data-wiping utility that complies with the United States Department of Defense data-wiping standards:
In order to accomplish with an standard of the Department of Deffense the deleted data must be wiped 3 or 7 times. But the information cannot be 00 or FF or any random data. The data recorder is an special algorithm to avoid magnetic read of downgrade layers in the disks or in the inter-tracks.
Generally, it takes a very long time to completely wipe the data from a hard drive; one user reported that the average time to wipe a hard drive using the DOD standard is one day for every 10 gigabytes of data that the hard drive can store (regardless of whether the space was utilized or not).
My son destroyed his hard drive by attaching the wrong adaptor, but luckily a friend introduced us to local franchise where someone was able to recover everything. Impressive - the computer stores he tried couldn't do anything with it.