Unusual Data Disaster Horror Stories

Lucas123 writes "Computerworld has posted stories from a disaster recovery company that include a scientist who drilled into his hard drive in order to pour oil into the mechanism to stop the squeaking. It worked. Of course a dead drive makes no noise. And, then a guy in Thailand who, after discovering ants in his external hard drive, took the cover off in order to spray the interior with insect repellent. Both the ants and the drive died."

Previous lists of stories.

[antdude]

2004 [slashdot.org].
2005 [ontrack.com].
Top 10 Ways To Lose Your Data due to the human factor [slashdot.org].
How to smash a home computer [bbc.co.uk].

I wonder if that Thailand guy should had used RAID setup, and not Raid [killsbugsdead.com] on his HDD. [grin]

The list

[sporkme]

Here is the list at the originator's site: http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/data-disasters-2007/?news=120407 [ontrackdatarecovery.com]

2006!

[antdude]

I forgot 2006 [ontrack.com]!

Also, here is Ontrack's official 2007 list [ontrackdatarecovery.com]. :)

Re:How to recover data from a damaged disk?

[_xeno_]

I assume you're asking for the original press release [ontrackdatarecovery.com] from Ontrack Data Recovery. And, helpfully, not linked from either the Slashdot summary or the Computerworld article.

Re:Skydiving

[cheater512]

Gravity is 1G.

Hitting the ground at high speed is *not* 1G.

The ol' freezer trick works maybe 75% of the time

[Anonymous Coward]

Give it a go. Put the faulty drive into a freezer and leave it there for a while (several hours to a couple of days, it doesn't really matter).

Pull it out and reconnect it to a system. You then have a reasonable chance of imaging it with something like Acronis True Image before the drive thaws and dies again.

I've used this trick at least a half-dozen times and only once has it not helped...unless you can see a smouldering crater in the controller board (or the disk itself!), it's worth trying.

For anyone who loves these kinds of stories

[Romicron]

This website [rinkworks.com] keeps a comprehensive list of tech support horror stories. I come back to this site every couple of months when I need a good laugh.

Re:Ah the nostalgia...

[Antique Geekmeister]

Actually, for systems that were flushed with dirty water such as that from coffee spills ceiling leaks, washing with distilled water is very helpful for washing away the corroding residue from the dirty water. You have to apply some sense in what and how you clean it, but if you don't clean it, the boards are much more likely to fail as acidic residue eats into the various coatings and compoents.

Re:For anyone who loves these kinds of stories

[Aehgts]

Or my personal favourite [worsethanfailure.com] has some great stories.

Re:Skydiving

[jeremyp]

The force is dependent on how long the camera takes to decelerate from 125m/s to zero when it hits the ground. If it takes 0.5 seconds, the acceleration would be -250m/s/s and the force for a 0.5kg object -125N. Of course 0.5 seconds is a long time for an object hitting the ground to take to come to rest, particularly if the ground is concrete.

Re:If you want a good laugh, go into repair

[nahdude812]

The most common cause of wheels on cars falling off is a side-effect of the parent of your post - people putting wheels on themselves and getting the lug nuts wrong. Lug nuts go on with the tapered side in. The taper keeps the lug nut centered to the bolt since there is a matching taper on the wheel hub. If you don't do this, the bolt shifts back and forth in the holes on the hub every time you accelerate and break. Eventually you weaken the shafts and they break off, tossing your wheel.

Why they don't make lug nuts with tapers on both sides I will never know, but I'm not a mechanic and I've actually seen it happen right in front of me two different times.

Accidental formatting

[skeptikos]

It happened 12 years ago or so. A co-worker asked me if he could use my computer to format a floppy disk because he was having problems with his. I said "yeah, sure."
He sat down, inserted the disk and typed "format c:". The rest is history.

Re:If you want a good laugh, go into repair

[Eivind]

Actually most cars here have lug-bolts rather than lug-nuts, and you can't put the bolt in the wrong way.

What you can however do is failing to seat the wheel 100% before tigthening the lug-bolts, for example having debris or dirt on the inner side of the wheel. Once the debris dislocates, for example because of vibration, acceleration and deceleration, the bolts come loose and the wheel may fall off.

Which is why the instruction-booklet says to retigthen the bolts after having driven 10 miles or so. Which in my experience 99% of car-owners neglect to do.

Re:Skydiving

[petermgreen]

OverlordQ got the equation he quoted right.

What he did not justify is how he went from a falling velocity of 125 meters per second to a deceleration of 6250 meters per second per second

Also his conversion from newtons to Gs is wrong 1G is 9.8 newtons so 3125 newtons is roughly 319G

The correct answer given a mass and a height is to say that you have not been given enough information to answer the question, to answer the question mathematically requires a lot of knowlage of the material properties of both the falling item and the surface being hit.

Re:This is a fairly tame list

[petermgreen]

There are ways to rig a parachute so it opens without someone pulling a cord, iirc the normal one is a second very small parachute which you don't pack up at all attatched to the ripcord. The military drop parachutes with just equipment on all the time.

With people they have the person pull the cord because that gives more control to open the parachute at the best time (e.g. after making sure they are well clear of the plane).

Re:Skydiving

[bunratty]

Except that the force that causes macroscopic objects to bump into each other instead of pass through each other is the electromagnetic force, not nuclear forces.

Re:This is a fairly tame list

[EMCEngineer]

This is most likely due to static electricity. Lots of static will build up, and most of these devices are probably not tested or not tested to very high levels.

Re:Ah the nostalgia...

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Water usually doesn't harm circuit boards unless they're energized while wet.

Deionized water can be in contact with many electronics while fully operational.