Recovery Stimulus Package

The Bad News: My personal media server blew it's hard drive the other day, taking with it almost all of my music, videos, and pictures. Nearly 100 gigs of MP3s, lovingly ripped by my wife and I from our CD collection, or acquired online. More than twice that of old TV shows, anime, and such. And tons of family and vacation photos. All locked away on a hard drive that suddenly refuses to boot, or allow access for more than five minutes at a time.

bleah.

The Analysis: I know... it's just data. It's just "stuff." But it still felt like a kick in the guts to know that all of that was gone. And I know it's not really "gone." Between my iPod and my wife's, I know that we've got almost all of the music available there. I had been meaning to delete a lot of the videos that I had already watched, but was packratting... old episodes of Naruto and Bleach, 3x3 Eyes, Mouse, Brimstone, Blue Seed, etc.

The family and vacation photos, on the other hand, have sentimental value and can't be replaced.

So it's not a total loss, but it's still an inconvenience. It's would be much better if I could just recover everything. I checked around for prices for data recovery, and for the most part they run $250 for corrupted data, and $600 for physical problems. It looks like I'm going to be fixing this one myself.

The drive itself is a 500 gig Western Digital drive that is currently out or warranty. When it's powered up, it runs fine and allow access when it's connected to my sata to USB connector, but stops being able to be read after five minutes or so. It also gets very hot.

So I figure that the heat is the big problem here. The other problem is that the drive is formatted in the linux ext3 file system, so windows refuses to recognize or read it.

The solution to the first problem seems to be finding a way to actively cool the drive. To that end, I've cobbled together a cooling solution that I really hope does the job. Start with a micro-fridge from ThinkGeek, add a ziplock bag full of water to help transfer as much heat as possible to the cooling element of the fridge, and cross your fingers.

The solution to the second problem seems to be R-Linux from r-tools technology. It runs on windows, and is capable of imaging broken drives, and extracting the files from ext2 and ext3 file systems. Hopefully, between these two, I can get back as much as possible. As I type this from work, the recovery program is working it's way slowly through the drive, one byte at a time. We'll see what it's recovered when I get home.

The Good News: I'm moving into the world of RAID! The replacement "drive" for the media server is going to be a pair of terabyte drives set up in a disk mirroring RAID 1 configuration. I'm also going to be adding another, smaller OS-only drive to the server. This way, the OS files will be separate from the media, and the media files will be protected in case one of the drives fails.