Defragged to death?

[diluzio91]

I was working on a computer for my gf's brother, gateway, windows 7, and installed updates, ran a defrag, then left, i walk away, the computer is on a black screen, then i reboot, try to run startup repair, and it sits for 4 hours and does nothing. What should i do? OS reload is the last possible resort.

[SXRguyinMA]

hdd randomly crap out?

[x88x]

Can you boot to safe mode? It's not an SSD is it?

[diluzio91]

It overheated half way through the defray and toasted the file system, took it to a friend with a data recovery system. Personal files are toast... Reinstall required. :(

[x88x]

Dowaaahhh??? :? :? I've never heard of a HDD overheating...

EDIT:
Well, except for that time one I was using caught on fire... :whistler:

[msmrx57]

Dowaaahhh??? :? :? I've never heard of a HDD overheating...

EDIT:
Well, except for that time one I was using caught on fire... :whistler:

Sound like an interesting story.

[x88x]

Sound like an interesting story.

Haha, less interesting than it sounds, unfortunately. It was a big, old HDD, with big, old chips...one of the chips was touching the metal frame of the case, and when I turned it on it burst into flames. ..that was my first encounter with fire in a computer...

[Luke122]

and when I turned it on it burst into flames. ..that was my FIRST encounter with fire in a computer...

...and now more info is required. :D

[Luke122]

Diluzio, make sure that the drive is not failing. It's not unusual for a hard drive with read issues to start running hot, so if that's the case, I'd test for failure before reinstalling anything.

[x88x]

...and now more info is required. :D

lol, the only other time I can verify that there was fire involved was this.
http://www.thebestcasescenario.com/forum/showthread.php?t=24905

Other than that, I've had a couple PSU blow up on me...well, capacitors in PSUs anyway...makes a huge popping sound...and then the smoke comes..

[diluzio91]

I think it is, but the drive installed windows okay, and all his music is on his ipod, he is just missing his old school docs, which he will now be saving on flashdrives (he had no backup previously) and he should be getting a new laptop soon

[x88x]

Since the drive is working now I'm gonna say that the drive probably did not overheat (you have have to be seriously trying to overheat a HDD), but instead something froze/hung/royally screwed up in some other way during the defrag process. You said it was hung when you got back to it and you power-cycled it? Either something broke in the defrag utility or it was just really slow in responding and something got lost/misplaced when you power-cycled it.

[diluzio91]

Since the drive is working now I'm gonna say that the drive probably did not overheat (you have have to be seriously trying to overheat a HDD), but instead something froze/hung/royally screwed up in some other way during the defrag process. You said it was hung when you got back to it and you power-cycled it? Either something broke in the defrag utility or it was just really slow in responding and something got lost/misplaced when you power-cycled it.

technically it power cycled itself for some unknown reason. i came back to a windows is loading screen with no logo. my mom who was next to it said it had been sitting on that screen for an hour or so

[x88x]

:eek: ...well that's...uhm...weird. Yeah, I'm gonna stick with the 'something got lost when it powercycled' theory. The defragger is not supposed to restart the computer, so something else must have decided it needed to reboot (Windows does that sometimes :P ) or some bsod/etc failure made it reboot...either way, this is a great example of why rebooting in the middle of a defrag is a bad idea.

I'm curious; what tools did your friend use to try and get data off it? The fact that it was trying to boot at all means that the filesystem was still intact, and even if that weren't the case, no more than one or two files should have been garbled at all, and none that . You should have been able to pull the files off with a data recovery tool. :?

[Luke122]

I love the smell of dying hard drives in the morning.. or afternoon. Any time really.. I love the challenge of data recovery!

[SXRguyinMA]

I love the smell of dying hard drives in the morning.. or afternoon. Any time really.. I love the challenge of data recovery!

then I have a 500GB SATA Seagate in front of me with a dead logic board and a couple hundred GBs worth of pics, music and videos that still need to come off of it :D

[nevermind1534]

Other than that, I've had a couple PSU blow up on me...well, capacitors in PSUs anyway...makes a huge popping sound...and then the smoke comes..

You just have to keep the smoke in. Block off all of the vents, and you won't have that problem; all of the magic smoke will stay inside, and it won't die that way.