Computers and Lighting don’t mix!

[tup48]

Computers and Lighting don’t mix!
Last Tuesday we had a freaky lighting storm come our way and before I could get to the computers thy got hit. Ended up with two dead computers and one dead router.

Have not been able to tell if the lighting came through the power line to the computers or if it hit the cad 5 line that runs from the shop to the house and got the computers through the router.

It fried booth mother boards and booth power boards. Had to take the hard drives to a computer shop and have them recover the data from them. Thy could only get the data off of house drive, the shop (the one with all of my goodies on) went by-by for good.

Had to buy two new ones (there goes my new mill and any new tooling I was thanking of). I paid less for two computers then I paid for my first one back in the late 80’s.
I’m now back up and running. Don’t know if I like this Windows Vista or not, but we will find out.

Richard

 

[zeeprogrammer]

It's probably the boards and not the disks. Any chance you know a geek/hack who can replace the boards on the drive and still get the data off? It's such a shame.

 

[vlmarshall]

I'll second Zeep's opinion. I've replaced a board on an old Western Digital drive to get the data off of it.

 

[black85vette]

There are data recovery services that can get information off of dead drives, but they are not cheap. Depends on how valuable the data is.

I run two hard drives in my PC's (drives are pretty cheap now) I duplicate my data on both for the short term in case one drive dies and then back up to DVD for long term storage. Another technique I use to to keep most data and downloads on the secondary drive and only load my programs and OS on the primary. In case of a Windows failure I have an image backup of the primary so I can restore the system in a couple of hours without reloading the OS and programs. Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image are both good for this.

Being a Ham radio operator, we experience more of this than most folks because of the "lightning attractors" we put high up in the air. ;D de AB5ON

Hope you get your data back!

 

[rake60]

I took a major power surge here a few years back.
The local power company was at fault and they paid to replace
two of my computers. (at a prorated cost. )

The surge took out the power supply in both machines but did
it not damage the hard drives. I just removed the hard drives from
the dead computers and installed them as slave drives on the new
machines. A few minutes of copy and paste and all of the data was
recovered to the new computers. After doing that the old hard drives
were removed and tossed in the trash. Nothing lost, nothing gained.

Rick

 

[black85vette]

I have found battery backup UPS systems very useful in keeping the power gremlins at bay. I have 3 right now. One on my computers and peripherals, one on my AT&T Uverse modem, and one on my flat screen TV and DVR in the living room. I can go for about 20 minutes without power before I have to shut down.

Guess my home is like a small scale version of the IT department I work in. Only thing I need now is a rack of servers and raid array discs! Oh yeah; and a 200 meg/sec Internet connection.

 

[vlmarshall]

Only thing I need now is a rack of servers and raid array discs! Oh yeah; and a 200 meg/sec Internet connection.

Don't we all? ;D