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 ?
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I’m the computer repair field. have come across ants damaging hard disks a couple of times. They destroy the disks as they get inside where the platters are. They eat some of the rubber seals and enter the mechanism. Just a few days ago they damaged a disk of mine in a laptop. Am yet to figure out why they go inside the hard disk. Am guessing its the rubber they like. Another technician told me of someone else’s hard disk just a few months old that crashed due to ants. He opened up the disk and there were ants under the platters. He says they had laid eggs there.
One hint if ants have started attacking your disk, back up all data immediately. Its just a matter of time before your disk crashes. The damage is usually irreparable as they physically damage your disk. I have seen this with my own eyes. I have a decade of experience in computer repair and also have experience in electronics for over a decade. So i know what i’m talking about when i say the damage is irreparable.
Comment by Trion — November 13, 2008 #
I could see some ants on my desk but never cared. One day my pc didnt start and when i opened the cabinet i saw an ant party on my board. i cleaned them but the system some time detected the hard drive and sometimes not. RESULT = my 360 GB hard drive was on an unrecoverable damage and i lost my 50 GB of porno downloaded from net ! along with some other data. I bought a 500 GB Hard disk and it works fine however i saw some ants again on my desk today. When i checked my 500 GB hard disk today. again shocked. a hell lot of ants on the hard drive.
Comment by stud — March 12, 2009 #
I thought my tragic experience of ants damaging hard disk is a unique one. Now I realize that many hae been prey to such mishappening. So henceforth, precaution not only aginst virus,but also against ANTS.
Comment by Mathew — April 6, 2009 #
Same situation happen to me just today. After cleaning off the ants ( I hope there’s none left inside it), I decided to search for situations like mine and shocked to see a lot today including this. Here’s one http://www.thedebug.com/harddrive.html, which is i guess the worst case. I just hope that the ants got a clue that I have HDD just today and never touch any rubber or whatever it likes to eat or else I have to back up all my data just to be sure. I never thought of ants as a danger for PC before.
Comment by Sarah — April 17, 2009 #
Hi dear All. This problem is not new. I lost my original hard drive of my compaque laptop on 15 september 2007. I had to install another seagate hard disk. I tried toarecover the data os my old disk but my comp. did not recognise / read it but I tries the same in another computer two partitions were recovered out of three, the one being the “c” not recovered.
This ant problem is common to may of us we know, but what is the reason that the ants attack only the HDD we dont know. Most likely answer it would be no 1. a good warm and dark place for the ants to settle and lay eggs. 2. rubbery sealing material for ants would serve as a food material possibly. and no 3. Rubbery smell or elecrtonics like smell may be palatble for ants. Still I see ants crawling over the laptop and the wire attachments. I am trying to get rid of the ants by the use of insecticide.
Comment by Dr BN Yadav — May 3, 2009 #
OMG, I also had very bad experiences with ants. 8 months ago, I left my laptop on my desk and went on 3 days vacation. When i came back, BOOM! the harddisk was attacked.
AND THEN…
It happened again today on my gf’s new PC! I was about to install some stuffs and noticed a few and began to suspect that
“NOT AGAIN, WTF…
Those ants had ruined my life, my BUDGET as well!!!
I want to kill every Ant in my sight!!!
Comment by Edgemaster — June 18, 2009 #
Ants got into my power supply unit and it blew in a ball of flames when I started my pc. If u see ants coming in and out of your computer don’t turn it on until your sure you’ve chased them away.
Comment by Bryan — August 12, 2009 #