Attack of the Ants
July 24th, 2005 at 01:43pm
The ants needed some hard disk space, and so, my hard disk was attacked by red ants last Friday.
Result : Hard disk conked off.
For the past couple of days, I could see some ants on my table. But never thought that they would get into the machine and take shelter inside the hard disk.
Everything was working fine till Friday morning. When i switched on my machine Friday night, the boot sequence was kind of abnormal. Scan-disk came up, and reported that some parts of my HDD weren’t readable, and was kind of stuck. Then I rebooted my machine, skipped scandisk, and managed to boot into windows. But it took around 30 mins to boot into windows. Damn slow. Knew something was wrong with the HDD. Rebooted again, and went into BIOS setup to detect HDD. In BIOS, things were behaving in a very unpredictable fashion. BIOS would detect the HDD sometimes and sometimes, on boot, i would get the message ‘Primary master failed’ etc. So, I decided to open up the PC and see whats up inside. Only to find that there were lot of ants right inside the HDD. :(
I have 2 HDD. Seagate (40 GB) and Maxtor(160GB). Both are stacked one about the other inside the cabinet. The ants were between these two HDD. Both the HDD’s were effected. But my primary HDD - Seagate was kind of damaged - may be bcoz of a short circuit. I immediately cleared off most of the ants that were outside. But there were ants inside too. i.e., between the PCB on the HDD and the sealed section of the HDD.
Took the hard disk /machine to the local vendor on Saturday, opened up the PCB of the HDD, cleared it. But the damage was already done to Primary HDD. :(.
Impact : Immediate and major impact was, lost the windows installation and some data. But nothing major that i can remember. So, i had to start from scrape on the other HDD. I am done installing all the basic stuff needed for day to day use.
Recovery : Luckily, the failed HDD (Seagate), was recognized by the BIOS. But there weren’t any partitions. I guess the partition table was damaged. Now, the recovery is on. I have managed to recover 3 out of the 4 partitions, and attempts are on to recover the last partition too. Some data is gone. But thats nothing to be worried about.
Reason : Not very sure what the reason is, but this is what my wild guess is. Its rainy season now, and is pretty cold outside. I keep my PC on for the whole night most of the days, and as a result, the HDD area is kind of Hottest spot in our room/house! So, i guess the ants sensed the warmth, and decided to take shelter over here.
Need to do a full fledged pest-control of my room/home. Now, no antivirus software can prevent this :). Can they ?
9 Comments Add your own
1. Harsh | July 24th, 2005 at 11:49 pm
Ah, thats where i am ahead of you dear. I use regular pest control methods around my PC.
:)
2. Arjun | July 25th, 2005 at 9:26 am
Harsh : Thats nice!. But do keep an Eye on the pests around. The pests might have got addicted to the pestisides! :)
3. Vikram | September 8th, 2005 at 2:47 am (subscribed to comments)
Hehe. Nice title !
Shall v use PEPSI/COKE ? Tats cheaper than the local pesticide available !
:D
4. Brams | October 25th, 2005 at 12:41 pm
I’ve just found why both of the hard drives in my Mac have just failed one after the other.
ANTS!. I’d seen them before on the table and thought nothing of it. However I took the PCB off one of both the drives and lo and behold there are signs of ant damage. A few dead corpses where on the PCB’s as well. How to prevent such a thing in future?
Beygone sprayed into a foam block and then left in side the computer case?
5. Shesh | January 10th, 2006 at 2:29 pm (subscribed to comments)
The ants in the Mangalore region are the most dangerous I have even seen in my life. I had very bad experience with them during my 4 year stay at Surathkal. The Mangalore red ants (unlike Mysore/Bangalore red ants) eat almost everything. They used eat my bed, clothes, whatever food items I used to get to my hostel room. Many times I have got up mid-night to clear ants from my bed!! Once red-ants had got into my dress, after bath I wore that dress and went strait to class room. Needless to say I had a very tough time in the class :-)
6. gaurav malhotra | January 20th, 2006 at 3:59 pm (subscribed to comments)
hi……… aey people . i too noticed two days ago that ants have attacked my hdd.
i cleaned it up. but they seem to like my hdd a lot and keep coming for it… hey if i go to a local vendor wont i lose my warranty.. please tell me .. coz i just bought my comp.. and what to do to stop the ants from coming
7. Jorge | October 23rd, 2006 at 2:08 pm (subscribed to comments)
Hey Arjun how did you recover your data? I have the same problem but I am not sure how to fix it. I am really gonna appreciate your help. Thanks in advance
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