NOOOO!!!!

Just turned on my system and 1terabyte external (IOMEGA) hard drive and found the drive has died!

All the old photo's stored on it are gone!!!

Now I'll have to find the old backup CDs.

Wouldn't mind but the latest K200 stuff is gone for good.

The lesson seems to be don't rely on technology.

OH MY GOD

That's my worst nightmare. Unfortunately I experienced it about five years ago and lost a ton of stuff. I now have two externals, one next to the computer, and one attached to the network and residing in a cupboard out in the garage. I use both daily!

Really feeling your pain

Moral of the story: keep all your pictures in at least two places

I always use 2 external backups, can never be too careful.

Are you sure there is no way you can retrieve the data: Take it to your local comp store and see if they can help.

If tried everything I can on the drive, so far, it just isn't reading the boot sector!

The really annoying thing is that my smaller,500gig, drive has just been formatted to give me a clean backup. Guess where the other copies were?

If you'd care to PM me your mailing address, I'll post you a copy of some software I've used successfully in the past in just such a situation.

Ray.

I've used R-Studio to recover data from failed drives. You'll find it here.

Well every cloud has a silver lining so they say, and Daves unfortunate experience has just reminded me I have'nt backed up ANYTHING that I've shot on the K20D so far

I've use Getdataback with some success. Apart from using 2 backup drives I also use Carbonite online backup - recommended. WWW.carbonite.com

too bad to hear... if the platters are okay they still can recover all information on it.
I'm really condering buying 2 or 3 disk to run them in raid 1 or 5, might also be a good idea for you.

You could have know

I've used Zero Assumption Recovery in the past. It's very good.

I keep everything on the computer, when the drive is full I get a bigger one.
I backup everything onto a external drive about once a week and after doing a lot of work.
I ocassionally, about once a month, backup everything to another external drive which I keep at my parents house.

The next thing I am going to get is a imagetank to backup memory cards when on holiday.

I never remove important stuff from the drive in the computer. I have two drives in the PC, one for the OS and apps and a second one for data. So if the OS drive fails I still have the data on the other one.

1. Try putting the disk drive in a new enclosure if you suspect it might be the enclosure rather than the actual disk drive that has failed.

2. Use recovery software on your SD cards even if you have reformatted or partly over-written them. You might still recover a few pics.

Are sure the drive died? As iceblinker suggested it might have been just the drive enclosure failure.

Does it start at all, or it's invisible for the system?

You may consider some professional data recovery services - but it's quite expensive solution I'm afraid.

Stefan: RAID 1 (or 5) matrix is a good thing, but you still should keep backups as well. The worst nightmare is the raid controller failure - all data lost on all drives.

I have an external (NAS) drive in RAID 1 configuration - it's not very fast, but I have access to all my files from any home computer, and they are quite safe. Plus I configured one of my PCs that it makes autobackup each day onto its harddrive. Still I should copy files to some DVDs I think.

In a bit paranoid mode I should keep copies in another location. Why? In case of flood / fire etc your backups will be lost if kept in the same place.

I know the pain of losing data - it's really awful

Raid 5 arrays are more efficient than a Raid 1 BUT if a Raid 5 drive fails then the system needs to rebuild and with 500GB, 1TB and similar size arrays that can take a long long time and there is a good chance that another drive may fail during the recovery process due to the amount of continuous disk access. That would be catastrophic.

With Raid 1 it is a pure mirror and is a lot easier to recover from and with discs reasonably cheap probably the way to go.

I have a Raid 1 using Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives and whilst fast they are the only expensive ones - 500GB drives are £300 to £400 each!

Take it out of the enclosure, and slave it internally. Windows should pick up on the fault and run checkdisk. That will identify any faulty clusters, and rewrite the data to a different part of the drive. If you have one or two images slap bang in the middle of the faulty sector, you may lose those, but you'll get pretty much all of it back.

Failing that, get yourself a copy of Knoppix (a Linux live CD ditro).. put it in the CD drive and see if it can see the data. It may be that the indexing info has gone for a burton, and Windows can't see it, but Knoppix can. It's free, but if you can't get a fast internet connection, go for the Puppy Linux live CD. Does the same, but with less bells and whistles.

If the drive still physically functions, either option should work. If it is a physical fault, then as Anvh states above, the platters should be recoverable.

Hope that helps.

If you get stuck with the Linux approach, give me a shout.. although I'm sure there are others equally capable of helping as well.

Cheers

Liam