DTLA Project update...

[dwilu]

It looks like I'll have to delay the thing again... my [not too]old 120gig hd broke down few weeks ago...  so I'll have to recreate all of my titan city props, and some of the maps from scratch... forgot to backup those
Hopefully I still have most of my race related stuff intact,just DTL lacks some weapons, but that's just fine
It is the second time my hd suddenly died... nvm, just a word of advice modders - do backups very often and beware of seagate sata laptop drives [never had problems with pata ones tho...]
BTW. ill drop some new screenies, once I'll deal with this mess...

[Lizard]

I've had several Harddrives die on me in recent months- if yours started making a clicking sound just before it died it may still be possible to rescue the data.

dunno if that's the problem you had but for me it was caused by overheating and by the time the computer had booted up the drive had had time to heat up and shut down, I found that by removing the drive from my case to keep it as cool as possible and connecting it as a slave drive with my main OS on the other drive (inside the case) I was able to transfer the files from the failing drive without losing any data.

[bigbadbogie]

and the moral of the story is to never trust anything and go home and say goodbye to your family and climb to the top of the nearest skyscraper and jump off and splat all over the kiddies in the park.

[Zero Angel]

Ahhh, the good old hard drive failure. I lost 2 months of work on my MOD to that too. Was enough to make me stop working on it. 

Would suggest if possible to set your toasted drive as the slave drive, and try to pull data off it. Some motherboards lock up if they find a faulty drive so it doesnt work very often. What I would do is try to throw my faulty drive into a HD enclosure and then plug it in just to get past the BIOS, if windows doesnt like it perhaps you can use a linux LiveCD like knoppix to mount the drive and pull data off of it (putting it on your new windows drive)

[dwilu]

I've had several Harddrives die on me in recent months- if yours started making a clicking sound just before it died it may still be possible to rescue the data.

...looks pretty similar... I was working on mod, then drive started to make clicking noise and lagged badly, win2k crashed few seconds later... I've tried to restart the thing, swap cables and stuff... but the drive even refuses to spinup, nor it's reckognized by bios... so I guess it's totally dead...

What I would do is try to throw my faulty drive into a HD enclosure and then plug it in just to get past the BIOS, if windows doesnt like it perhaps you can use a linux LiveCD like knoppix to mount the drive and pull data off of it (putting it on your new windows drive)

Tried that one too, as my second pc runs Debian... no such luck... it looks like drive's logic board got toasted...
anyway, I'm not abandoning this mod yet, it just will take a while longer
...also I'm planning to relase some ia/mp demo before the full mod.
Demo should consist of 3-5 sp missions with independent storyline, some ia and mp maps, and I'm considering using grayscale graphics for it... Why? because nobody did it before...

[Lizard]

and I'm considering using grayscale graphics for it... Why? because nobody did it before...

a B/W mod , that would be very cool it could potentially be very atmospheric , rather than use greyscale why not use sepia tone colours to make it look like one of those really old fashioned photographs.

[Avatar]

Two old tricks for getting a dead HD to fire up one more time so you can grab data...

The first is radical, use it only if you're absolutely sure the HD is dead. 

If overheating (or whatever) has caused issues with the bearings it's possible that a good, sharp smack straight down onto a concrete surface will break them free one last time.  Give it a good smack, flat down on the widest side, on a very hard surface...  this has worked several times for me, but it's highly likely your runtime will be pretty short so read the last little bit and access the drive that way...

The second is the easiest and darned if it doesn't work more often than not...

Just place the drive in the freezer overnight.  This shrinks everything inside, freeing up stuck parts and breaking any sort of 'weld' that may have occurred between parts.

Either way, you don't want to waste minutes of the remaining runtime of the thing on booting up, so get yourself an IDE to USB adapter and power supply...  I have a rig on my workbench that used to be a USB external HD.  Open them up and you've got everything you need to plug in any drive once the system is up and running.  There are some cool adapters available online also, but you'll still need a power supply...

-Av-

[dwilu]

Ok, just tried freezing the drive for a few days... I've put it into ziplock just in case, and then into fridge...
...and... wee! the drive started up on usb... but... windows said that the disk is unformatted...
I've tried it on my other comp with linux... and same here... "NTFS map style unreadable..."
looks like the thingy got corrupt... I'm on my own with this and my lost stuff, yet not alone with the seagate death problem... [read here] :
http://www.retrodata.eu/index.php/data-recovery/users-of-apple-macbooks.html
mine was exactly the same hdd... just in regular applefree laptop