JohnCalvinYoung.com

I could really use some prayer right now. We just lost the main AND sec­ondary dri­ves on our family’s main com­puter. The CPU had had some over­heat­ing issues, so I cleaned the dust out of the case and then checked it for sta­bil­ity. It was run­ning fine (and cool under major load), so I put the side back on the case and left it to run overnight. When I got up in the morn­ing, it had blue­screened again like it had over­heated. Mom hit restart, and when the BIOS came up, it said the main drive had failed, and the sec­ond was in bad con­di­tion. Both dri­ves started mak­ing the dreaded Click of Death that sig­ni­fies that it is a mechan­i­cal fail­ure, not just a chip burnout (which still be fixed rel­a­tively eas­ily). I tried it in a dif­fer­ent computer–no go. Some peo­ple have had suc­cess with cool­ing off a fail­ing hard drive and get­ting one last boot out of it to pull the data off. It’s not work­ing for me, though. To cut a long story short, the sec­ond drive failed when I tried to boot off of it–and nei­ther the freezer trick nor any­thing else I have tried is work­ing. The main drive seems to be unable to ini­tial­ize, not to speak of spin up. The sec­ond one just can’t spin up, even though the elec­tron­ics seem OK.

And here comes the bad news: when I started look­ing around for back­ups, the lat­est I had was a February 14^th backup–and it was incom­plete. To save time, I had not backed up ANY of my film footage or mas­ters. I have the only extant mas­ters of seven sep­a­rate short films on that drive (four of them mine) includ­ing three San Antonio semi-finalists. Obviously, I’m about to come unglued over it–I don’t know why the Lord is putting me through this, but I’m hav­ing to pray for faith to deal with all this a lot right now. I have been research­ing recov­ery options, and I under­stand that a recov­ery ser­vice can in some types of hard­ware fail­ure open up a drive in a clean­room and swap the plat­ters to another drive to pull the data off, just as long as it’s not too badly dam­aged. The only thing is that that sort of ser­vice STARTS at $600 PER DRIVE, and I just don’t have that sort of money at the moment. Something strange–both drives–from dif­fer­ent man­u­fac­tur­ers, one used at least 4–6 months longer than the other, with very dif­fer­ent usage patterns–failed within 12 hours of each other with a phys­i­cal hard drive crash.

Anyrate, I could really use some prayer. I have the dri­ves on ice (lit­er­ally, but don’t worry, they’re sealed up) and I’m pray­ing that they will stay sta­ble until I can check out the options for pos­si­bly get­ting them recov­ered in the future. As it is, it’s only the Lord’s mercy that I have as much of it as I do backed up–I was rather remiss with back­ups, need­less to say, and I only backed that 10GB up because I thought I had a virus in February. So if y’all can pray that we have the faith to deal with this and start recon­struct­ing every­thing on those dri­ves (it wasn’t just video, it was the main fam­ily com­puter for four years)… And if any­body knows any­thing about hard drive recovery…well, I’d be glad to hear some­thing. Pretty stressed right now…

In His Service,
John Calvin