Electronic postmortem

[Elok]

My PC died not that long ago. We took it to a repairman, who told us that the RAM and hard drive were all kaput simultaneously. Total write-off. We got it back with both parts replaced. I haven't tried it yet to find out if he was able to salvage anything at all from the old hard drive (not even sure if he tried said transfer, since somebody else picked it up for us). We'll try that this evening. But, question: could anything at all have caused that beyond my kids playing with magnets close to it? It hadn't been cleaned in ages, if that makes a difference. A cleaning allowed it to start up, but it couldn't even finish loading Windows.

And, if there are intact files on the old hard drive, would there be any danger in transferring them to a healthy PC?

[rah]

Transfers of old files are unlikely to cause a problem. Unless you old computer was riddled with viruses.

Hard drives fail eventually. Almost every drive i've ever had fail if I kept it long enough. Ram though is a bit more rare and shouldn't happen at the same time. A dirty environment can cause problems.

If the give you back you old drive and you have a docking port for it, try the old trick of putting it in the freezer over night. Sometimes that works for a short time, sometimes even long enough to get file you want off of it.

[Elok]

Holy crap, the file's intact. Or seems to be; I'm typing this from my repaired PC, and some things are a little weird, but it's largely fine. An ebook now seems vaguely feasible. Hot damn!

[Sir Og]

You should back up your important files.

[rah]

Now that you can buy 128gig thumb drives, there is no excuse not to. I can back up everything important onto one.

[Lorizael]

Also backup them up online.

[BeBMan]

When the power supply on my old PC died it got repaired/replaced for ca. 25 euro doubloones). If it was more serious I'd just buy a new one (did this later for other reasons). But of course depends what you do with the machine, for internet/writing etc. you don't need a supermachine.

Just sayin' / 2cents

[rah]

Also backup them up online.

I'm technically an IT expert and I probably should know better, but I'm still not convinced of the security of the cloud. I sit in security meeting after security meeting listening to new defense after new defense just to see them most of them be eventually beaten.
The only true security is not having your machine connected to a network or external devices. Impractical, but the only method I know that hasn't been defeated.

[Lorizael]

I'm only suggesting it as an extra backup just in case, like, your house burns down. Everything important to me is stored on my computer, an external harddrive, and my Google drive. If that means hackers might be able to steal my ****ty stories, I wish them all the luck in the world in getting them published.

[rah]

On that I have to agree, but most people keep stuff on their machine that they probably shouldn't. I keep nothing on my machine (yeah some pictures) but nothing that could be used to steal my identity. Even though I must admit that I'm sometimes careless with cookies that technically could be used.

[loinburger]

I'm technically an IT expert and I probably should know better, but I'm still not convinced of the security of the cloud. I sit in security meeting after security meeting listening to new defense after new defense just to see them most of them be eventually beaten.
The only true security is not having your machine connected to a network or external devices. Impractical, but the only method I know that hasn't been defeated.

I encrypt my data before uploading it to the cloud - 7-zip makes it easy, although it's not the most portable solution (I can't be arsed to find a Mac client, but I only use a Mac for work so I don't see why I'd be trying to access old tax returns or whatever from my work computer)

The other nice thing about 7-zip is that you can break up a compressed file into smaller chunks - I've got a 30gb copy of my system hard drive partition uploaded to google drive which google drive is not at all happy about, but split into 100mb chunks it uploads just fine

[loinburger]

could anything at all have caused that beyond my kids playing with magnets close to it?

Probably not, my understanding is that it's difficult to damage a modern hard drive with rinky-dink magnets - at worst you're just going to spin the platters. I went to a seminar on hard drive degaussers once, and they use magnetic fields that are orthogonal to the platters in order to erase them, and they need hella powerful magnetic fields to accomplish this.

[Dinner]

On the upside decent new computers are now cheap.

[Elok]

Probably not, my understanding is that it's difficult to damage a modern hard drive with rinky-dink magnets - at worst you're just going to spin the platters. I went to a seminar on hard drive degaussers once, and they use magnetic fields that are orthogonal to the platters in order to erase them, and they need hella powerful magnetic fields to accomplish this.

This was my guess just b/c the computer crashed shortly after my MIL gave the kids a bunch of extra-strong magnets to play with--strong enough that you can stick one on top of your hand, one in your palm, and have the former levitate the latter. It was the most significant change I could think of prior to the catastrophic failure. But we'd probably have noticed them sticking those things to the PC. In any case, we have it back with minimal changes, so there's that.

[Bereta_Eder]

hA! I knew it was the RAM


peculiar though. probably the PC wasn't cleaned since a long time. It overheated the RAM gave way