Starting From Scratch!

[sticky feet]

Might do good. first advice i can give you regarding that is never ever try to find samples you lost a long time.
That happened to me once and i was looking for them like a madman, saying to myself "oh shit, if i only had that sample this tune would be 100% better"
purely lying to myself.
After a while, i got over it and just went on.

[contakt321]

It's a sickening feeling.

I have had it happen and I was totally demoralized.

Ultimately it was the best thing that happened to me musically. It's what inspired me to switch from hardware to software, and in this process I really learned how to enjoy making music again.

Out with the old, in with the new!

[karmacazee]

Same thing happened to me - hard drive fizzled out while I was working on three separate soundtracks for a few short films. Not good, missed the deadline. Cried.

Then I sent my Hard drive off to a company that specialises in retrieving data from dead HD's: http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/ . It took a few weeks (and cost a few bucks) but they managed to get everything off of it, and they sent me a new ext. HD with all my old files on it, totally in tact.

Was very happy....

[connection]

I recently lost 12 years worth of samples when the Portable HD I had backed up to failed on me.

After 5 days of trying various recovery programes, I finally found one that recovered everything.

Has your HD died totally or can you still boot up the laptop?

I'll try and find the app I used. It was a DOS based app and was dead easy to use.

PM me and I'll help if I can...

Have faith!!!

EDIT:

Here's the App I used with instructions.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

I hope this helps?

[mycota]

yeah my laptop got stolen about a year ago, and i didnt have anything backed up...

the new start was good for me

[mondays child]

Yeah, it's a bastard when that happens, i don't put my samples on my external HD, i put them on old ZIP disks, via a Jazz drive i still got which i use with my Akai Sampler. And Tapes, i got loads of old C90 tapes with samples on, to be honest i like the analogue warmth.

[connection]

Hey thanks man, i just got off the phone to dell before i came on; £204 all inclusive for repairs and they're going to pick it up tommorrow. The hard drive is completely dead apparently; right after i broke mi laptop, it was booting up but now it's just beeping and the hdd is making no sound =/. Luckily i've manage to start loading back most of my music and can easily reinstall my software & vstis back once i get my laptop back but it's just the patches, projects ect, all the irreplaceable stuff . I'm just going to check out that link but by the sounds of it the power to the hard drive has just failed .

No worries my man. It's a shitter when it happens, but see what Dell say. They may be able to get it going. I never believe data is lost until I'm told otherwise, but it's pretty bleak when it goes missing...

One word of advice. Back everything up to a hard copy of some description. I make DVD's of all my samples, arrangements etc regularly as well as having a Portable HD copy my Desktop HD.

Good luck!

[groucho_marxx]

my harddrive recently became corrupted (blue screen of death) I used ubuntu to get access to it and saved it to an external that way.

[fiziks]

Always back up to DVD or cd. The rumors about Cd's going bad is bull. I've got discs from 2000 that work fine. But yeah, I've got all my essential breaks and drum machine samples archived to disk.

I use to have all the zildjin wav's from their website that I lost along the way. That's the only thing I really miss.

As far as tunes to sample, fuck it. Sample new ones. I recently deleted a few gigs worth of jazz and funk tunes that I've downloaded over the years. I'm done downloading tunes to sample. Vinyl, Cd, or from a movie only.

I want a recorder to start recording random shit too.