Unusual Data Disaster Horror Stories 324
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."
Skydiving (Score:5, Funny)
If at first you don't succeed
skydiving is not for you.
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Re:Skydiving (Score:5, Informative)
Hitting the ground at high speed is *not* 1G.
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Re:Skydiving (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Re:Skydiving (Score:5, Informative)
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*disclaimer:3rd/75th Rangers-Airborne/10th SFG/Europe-Yeah, had master's wings, made a bunch of jumps!*
Much easier to reconstruct a recorded event than to reconstruct a person.
Gopher (Score:5, Funny)
I didn't discover what was wrong until I woke up the next morning and began troubleshooting my mysteriously powered-down system.. the largest lifeform that my computer had ever consumed.
Re:Gopher (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Gopher (Score:4, Funny)
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Dude! You can love your pets...just done LOVE your pets. Know what I'm sayin'?
Re:Gopher (Score:5, Funny)
A. A condom, hopefully.
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This doesn't quite fit in to the category of data disaster, because no data was lost.. ..once as I was going to bed my cat was chasing something on the floor of my room,[ ... ] the next day I discovered it was a gopher, and it had lodged itself in between the old Reset and Turbo button panel and the motherboard.. and struggled.. and bled to death.. all over my running 386 SX 40 motherboard.
You cat should have used Veronica [wikipedia.org].
Re:Gopher (Score:4, Funny)
If you want a good laugh, go into repair (Score:5, Interesting)
People are not necessarily stupid. From their point of view, what they did makes a lot of sense. You, as someone who knows more about the subject, can only shake your head in disbelieve. That starts with the examples mentioned here and ends with the guy who heard about some oil based liquid cooling, which caused him to have the smart idea to fill his computer with hot Crisco.
There is literally no limit to the human inventiveness when it comes to breaking stuff.
Re:If you want a good laugh, go into repair (Score:5, Funny)
A: There's a limit to intelligence.
Re:If you want a good laugh, go into repair (Score:4, Funny)
Re:If you want a good laugh, go into repair (Score:5, Funny)
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"How" is always the same: "I slipped while stepping out of the shower".
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Actually, I don't want to know.
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The repair guy was allegedly quite surprised by the weight of the unit and the curious smell of french fries coming from it.
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http://www.digi.no/php/art.php?id=499065 [www.digi.no]http://www.digi.no/php/art.php?id=499065
Unfortunately I haven't been able to find an english version of this list, but it fetaures among other things a guy on a fishing trip who accidently dropped his laptop into the lake, and a scientist who spills acid on his external hardrive.
But the first place is probably the most spectacular.
A heavy snowfall gave a woman in Østfold(county in Norwa
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And putting your laptop onto a snow blower is VERY dumb.
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Re:If you want a good laugh, go into repair (Score:5, Funny)
Lady on the phone: "Could you please send a mechanic to fix my car ? I can't come to the garage, because the problem is, a wheel fell off".
Brother: "We could do that, where do you live ?"
Lady: "At so-and-so, oh and could the mechanic please stop in the crossing of X and Y, pick up the wheel and bring it along, that's where it fell off."
Brother: "So, that's where we'll find the vehicle too then ?"
Lady: "Oh no, I noticed the wheel falling off, and the car made a horrible scraping sound, but I was in a hurry, so I drove it home on 3 wheels."
End-effect: A 10-minute re-attachment of a wheel turned into the need to completely replace the disc-brake on one wheel, and readjust suspension. $1500, for what would otherwise have been like $100 (she could've put the wheel back on herself really, if she had half a clue)
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End-effect: A 10-minute re-attachment of a wheel turned into the need to completely replace the disc-brake on one wheel, and readjust suspension. $1500, for what would otherwise have been like $100 (she could've put the wheel back on herself really, if she had half a clue)
But how does a wheel "fall off" to begin with ? I don't drive all that much (mostly using my bike, buses and the metro, comes from living in the city), but I can't recall ever having a wheel "fall off".
And what would she put it back on with ? Super-glue ?
Re:If you want a good laugh, go into repair (Score:5, Informative)
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.
similar experience after an accident ... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, that's basically what happened. Some nut not paying attention drove right into my car around 40mph. Needless to say, my car's left side didn't survive. I was in the house when I heard it, looked out the window, and saw this car impaling my own.
So I go out to investigate, and the woman is attempting to drive away
The rage I felt was unimaginable. But I calmly said, "Sure, how about I go into the house and get some super glue and we'll fix that right up for you."
It was either the shock of the accident or she was just that stupid
But I'm a cruel heartless bastard, even more so when someone doesn't get the sarcasm. "On second thought, we're waiting for a tow truck, and the cops."
And no, she wasn't drunk (the cop was honestly surprised).
Re:If you want a good laugh, go into repair (Score:4, Funny)
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It has mainly microwave devices, but it's nice to see some variety - like the snake.
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He got there and fiddled with the tv and box for awhile and started looking at the cabling. Eventually he found a piece of exposed cable along the wall. It had been cut, cleanly, with the two ends sitting about a foot apart.
He pointed this out to the lady, who said she had to move the TV a bit so cut the cable. Her expl
Re:If you want a good laugh, go into atom smashing (Score:3, Insightful)
Try studying quantum mechanics.
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In that case, anything dealing with anything remotely mechanic is quantum mechanics.
Re:If you want a good laugh, go into atom smashing (Score:3, Funny)
1) Do not place hard drive within 10 feet of 5 tesla muon detector.
2) Do not use fiber optic cable labeled "Insulation approved by Mouse Gourmets."
3) You don't know what overclocking is until you have a source of liquid helium.
Re:If you want a good laugh, go into atom smashing (Score:2)
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Computers is kids play in the mind of many people. Quite literally. The 10 year old next door can fix his computer, so it can't be that hard, can it? I mean, I'm an adult, so I am supposed to know heaps more than that snotty kid, so it has to be simple. And you can't do a
This is a fairly tame list (Score:3, Interesting)
As for the memory stick one, my dear old 512MB Sandisk USB memory stick has been through the wash twice and survived fine. I've heard other people say the same thing. Anyone else have this happen to them? Anyone have a bigger storage medium go through the wash?
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Maybe they meant that the tape had to be recovered and inserted into a new cassette. I know I've done that once already
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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).
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Even after washing it out, it didn't work for a couple of days. Obviously I hadn't dried it properly the first time, because leaving it by the radiator for a few nights seemed to do the trick and now it works again.
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Just sayin'
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Ah the nostalgia... (Score:2, Funny)
...a return to the days when computer bugs were really bugs...
...now if we could just get back to the days when the people using the computer helped design the thing and knew better than to douse it in any kind of liquid...
Re:Ah the nostalgia... (Score:5, Informative)
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Deionized water can be in contact with many electronics while fully operational.
How to recover data from a damaged disk? (Score:5, Funny)
If there are companies that recover data, how come we never hear about them in Slashdot articles? It would seem relevant to this audience.
Re:How to recover data from a damaged disk? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
The ol' freezer trick works maybe 75% of the time (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Are you serious? (Score:4, Funny)
I usually try with a Linux bootcd first, making appropriate image backups. If that ever fails, I'll send it to a data recovery center.
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Nah, you couldn't possibly be. I mean, what a hilarious coincidence that the OP would bring up something that was in the article itself, without even realizing it!
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Such services are not quite invaluable, but they tend to earn their money.
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You might want to check your sarcasm detector; it seems to be malfunctioning.
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This usually occurs when heat causes parts of the hard drive to expand and rub against one another. Freezing the drive can shrink them enough to allow you to get data off the drives. However, due to the large size of modern hard drives, it is possible that you will not have enough time to transfer the full contents of a drive before it heats up again. This used to work really well, and in the field, it was a crowd-pleaser.
Previous lists of stories. (Score:5, Informative)
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]
2006! (Score:4, Informative)
Also, here is Ontrack's official 2007 list [ontrackdatarecovery.com].
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i would mod you up so quickly had i points!!!! (for any thais reading: 555!)
i lived in thailand for a year, and let me tell you, the ants can get anywhere, even in my 20th floor condo. but they usually - obviously - only collect where there is some food source. so i suggest that guy had a bigger problem than ants in his hard drive. prolly dropped a chocolate bar or something in the box. our condo would always remain ant free, until, that is, something dropped on the floor. then, within a half-hour, there w
The list (Score:4, Informative)
Disk death by beer (Score:2)
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I have to ask...What kind of beer? Here in the USA we all know that Fosters is 'Australian for Beer', give it up mate!...Set us straight. (use humour filter here, PLEASE!)
*disclaimer: for a 'lite' beer, I do like Fosters, but I really like my Guiness Extra Stout for my everyday pint.*
Truly no disrespect implied or intended here, but what kind of ant was it? (my entomology professor is looking over my shoulder!!! He is REALLY into applying biology to t
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In Australia "light beer" means low alcohol instead of light in colour or not needing a shovel to get to the bottom like a lovely pint of Guiness.
Death by coffee (Score:5, Funny)
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You'd think the ant would spin up while still under the effect of the beer.
Oil (Score:3, Funny)
Tssk, everyone knows one should just ignore the sq
For anyone who loves these kinds of stories (Score:5, Informative)
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Data Disaster Horror Stories (Score:4, Funny)
That reminds me of this one time... (Score:2, Funny)
I can imagine what the ants were thinking (Score:5, Funny)
Ants rule! (Score:3, Interesting)
Bugs in the computer [ncl.ac.uk]: Sun Microsystems [sun.com], Inc. knows why Brazil is known to its native inhabitants as the kingdom of the ants.
Ants in yer... [synaptic.bc.ca] Pants? NOT! (Toshiba [toshiba.com] notebook/laptop); Ants Invade Apple iBook [slashdot.org].
Ants In My Nokia [yahoo.com] (A Yahoo! [yahoo.com] account is required) 5210 Mobile Phone.
Ants in Omniview switchboxes [zimage.com]: An e-mail story of ants invading a network switchbox.
Argentine ants invade a network hub [blogspot.com].
A photograph [flickr.com] showing ants nesting in a guy's phone box, affecting his DSL connection and phone system.
YOU KILLED MABEL! (Score:3, Funny)
yawn (Score:5, Insightful)
These aren't disasters; all of these folks got their data back.
If this is the going rate for disaster articles these days, I might as well tell you all about the hard drive I recently rescued out of a Dell laptop after the Geek Squad had given up on it (big surprise, that). The Toshiba drive had either very bad spindle bearings or a failed head stack (or both), as when I powered it up it vibrated like crazy and made a very rapid thumping noise, but none of this was a big surprise given that it was a little over four years old.
In experimenting with it, I found a few interesting features:
Plugging it into a Windows box to try running Acronis against it immediately bluescreened the host machine.
When powered up, if the drive was slowly rotated, the nature of the thump would change, and something inside would emanate a horrible metal-on-metal grinding sound for as long as I kept rotating it (apparently due to the gyroscopic effect of the spinning platters along with the failed bearings).
The drive was totally unusable in its normal (label-side up) orientation; Linux wouldn't even read the partition table in that state.
But if I carefully propped the drive up, in a very particular, almost-vertical position resting on its connector, it worked. Not only that, but dd was able to recover every single sector of the disk, without error. I then dd'd that back to a new disk, reinstalled Windows (the theory is that Best Buy's fine Geek Squad managed to fuck up XP somehow) on it, did some shuffling of partitions in Acronis, and gave the customer back a working computer complete with their family photos and music library.
Total recovery of user data, much rejoicing, !=disaster.
Or, there was the 200GB Seagate desktop drive that was under six feet of water for about 48 hours. It worked just bloody fine after letting it dry for a week, and then removing the cover to dry out the innards a bit more. Despite the visible traces of river silt still laying on the platters, Windows Explorer was more than capable of retrieving all of the requested data.
Total recovery of user data, much rejoicing, !=disaster.
On the other hand, another (different model) Seagate drive which was also in the same flood failed miserably. Swapping controller boards did not help. Kroll's pricing for recovery was deemed too expensive, and it was therefore a total loss.
It was the hard drive from one of my boss's machines. Years worth of quotations and customer data that were stored in Outlook which he had been accustomed to referring to, all gone. This, of course, ==disaster. (But it was a minor disaster compared to the rest of the flood, which destroyed his office building, trashed the basement at his house, and ate enough of my own house that it is now condemned.)
He is still insistent on maintaining his own PCs, and has subsequently been given the standard-issue lecture about backups, which he'd already heard in the past. We'll see if it soaked in, this time.
But I seem to be digressing a lot, here. The point is, in a world stuffed [catb.org] full [essex.sch.uk] of stupid [rinkworks.com] and funny [theregister.co.uk] computer stories, TFA doesn't seem to include any. The absence of both well-written humor and real disasters factored with the total lack of technical details equates to this article being positively inane and simply as useless as common whitewash [wikipedia.org]. (Another example of this same PR tactic, not surprisingly from Kroll'
Mouse shit in Apple IIe disk drive==no more coding (Score:2, Interesting)
Dog Ate My Homework (Score:2)
What makes this disaster unusual is that it actually happened. No, the prof didn't believe it either.
beep beep beep (Score:4, Funny)
Parachute cam (Score:2)
Flash memory in washing machine (Score:4, Interesting)
Paid articles? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ants - now he is safe (Score:4, Interesting)
I figured this when I had a serious ant problem in my office. Living on the tropics we have these things we call sugar ants. Tiny hyper fast ants, that appear on anything and everything with half a calorie in it.
Now one day I put my Sony MDR-whatever DJ headphones on in the office, to come to a realization that I was ithching like hell. Itching and tickling. That was because ants were escaping from both my headsets. Over the weekend they built a damn nest inside, and when I shook them up they were transporting eggs and who knows what out of the nest in a hurry.
Being a vegetarian treehugger I usually do not kill anything. Unless it attacks me. So there went the headset into the fridge.
Cold slows ants down. Then they can shake them off. It works. After cooling them I opened the set and got the nest out, and threw it in the garden (ants actually seem to de-hibernate/defrost and come back to life, though probably there was collateral).
To cut the story short: from that point I was really careful with my headphones, and inspected them before putting them on. But they never returned. There was a similar incident in a CD case. Then again the ants never ever returned.
I only used cooling, then getting the ants out, never any chemicals (I do not use chemicals when possible, I am simply scared of them. I better eat 200000 instances of bacteria then breathe in one sip of chemical fume, be it desinfectant, window cleaning liquid, or bug killer spray.
Oiling the disk is the stupidest thing I have ever heard of
Bash the Keyboard in disContent (Score:5, Funny)
I have to ask...
[Blitz] Start=}Run, type in "command", then type deltree
[J0E] ok 1 sec, this better not fuck up my pc
[Blitz] it wont
[J0E] omfg, its deleting!
[Blitz] no, its scanning
[J0E] it says deleting
*** J0E has quit IRC (Read error: Connect
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The general public has come to Linux, like it or not.
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Q: How do I delete a directory in linux?
A: You do rm -rf /
Somehow, people didn't think it was very funny
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Thank goodness the porn folder starts with "p"
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As for personal data disasters. There was a Dell Laptop model (can't remember which one) that has a short screw directly over the hard drives circuit board. I put in a slightly longer screw by mistake and killed the drive.
It took us 2 days to find the exact model on E-Bay then 2 minutes to swap the circuit boards. After which the data was transferd to
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As for personal data disasters. There was a Dell Laptop model (can't remember which one) that has a short screw directly over the hard drives circuit board. I put in a slightly longer screw by mistake and killed the drive.
It took us 2 days to find the exact model on E-Bay then 2 minutes to swap the circuit boards. After which the data was transferd to an external drive. Then a brand new replacement drive was installed for regular use.
That Blunder cost around $150 and 5 days of downtime on a laptop but I (and all the other geeks in the office) learned a lot about being meticulous.
I got to do something very similar to that about a year ago. One of the engineering departments here has their own webserver, running on a SparcStation 10. Think 1989, 1990, something like that. It was working great until the hard drive's circuit board caught fire. Well OK, caught fire might be a BIT of an overstatement but there were charred components on the board and smoke-trails inside the enclosure, so, close enough. I've done the drive-board-swap thing a few times in the past and it works if yo
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There is really nothing wrong with riding an old computer into the ground. Just make sure you plan an escape path. I.e. Test your software and configuration on new hardware. If you have multiple ancient boxes in your data centre and the testing is a routine matter then keeping just a few spares around to swap out whichever old box keels over is a cost saving measure.
Actually, I disagree. We've got almost 2000 Unix servers in our environment. The oldest 10% of them give us maybe 50% of our problems. In the case of a sparcstation 10, it has gone well past end of life, end of service life, and is into the "You're joking, right" phase of support from the vendor. So when something like this dies, someone on my team has to spend a day or two doing heroics to compensate for something that shouldn't have been in the data center in the first place.
I should know we. We just replaced an old monstrosity with 4 CPUs and dedicated external storage with a bare bones PE1950 and internal 250 GB SATA RAID1.
Not because the new box was faster or more reliable. But simply to save on electricity.
In addition to heat and
Re:Backups... (Score:5, Funny)
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