Folks, I had my first-ever HD crash! --LONG--

It happened sometime early last Sunday night. I went into the office/Bat Cave to check email before going to bed, and my Shuttle was clicking about once a second. I decided to just reboot it, and clicked on Start. The Start menu came up and froze. Hmm. I did the three-finger salute. Nothing. Saluted again. Nothing. Hmm. I powered the PC down, waited a few seconds, and hit the Power button. The "Intel Inside" logo came on the screen, and the machine froze. WTF? I was too sleepy to do much else, so I turned the machine off and went to bed.

Monday morning I powered up the PC, but again I got the Intel logo and then nothing. I waited for an excruciatingly long time (to nervous me...probably 30 seconds or so) and then the BIOS screen came up, notifying me that I had a hard disk failure. Aha! I put my SpinRite CD-ROM disc in and rebooted. SpinRite could see the HD, and not knowing better, I did a scan of its surface. The HD seemed to be fine, but again, the BIOS seemed to think it was toast.

I called probably the most reputable computer store here in Atlanta -- where I buy all my computers, incidentally -- and Tech Support didn't hesitate a second before confirming that the HD was probably dead. I took the machine in to the store's hardware gurus, and they got to it in about an hour (spurred by my paying a $99 Rush Fee in addition to the $129 Diagnostic Fee). They said that the HD was unreadable. Great. I had them install a 320 GB drive (the old one was 200 GB) just in case I start doing Ots Video.

When I picked up the Shuttle on Tuesday, I found out that the store had installed Windows XP SP2. I had SP1 on the old HD. I would have no problems, they said. But they couldn't change the Admin name from "Brian Durio" to "Bryan Durio". Harrumph. But I'm used to that. So I got the machine home and prepared to do a complete restore -- minus the Windows directory -- from my Retrospect backup. I was going to just have Retrospect overwrite the Windows Registry file, but before I did I called Retrospect Tech Support. It turned out that they don't really do support for my (old) 2002 version of the software without a $75 fee. WTF?? But they did confirm that it wouldn't be a good idea to overwrite an SP2 registry file with an SP1 registry file. Uh oh.

So I mulled it over, and decided to wipe the HD clean and reinstall SP1. In my infinite wisdom, I decided to do a low-level format, which took forever to complete. I reinstalled SP1, but in the initial Windows boot when it asks if it has a direct connection to the Internet, I clicked the "Of course...who doesn't?" button. Windows thought a while and decided that no, I don't. This yielded yet another WTF from me. I fiddled and fiddled and fiddled, but no Internet. No communication with my router. I couldn't see the little light on the port, either. Sh!t, it looked like my NIC had died! Great! So back to the store I go, Shuttle under my arm.

Murphy must have been smiling down on me because after about 5 minutes of fiddling around with the network settings, the tech restored my network connection. It was the same thing that I had done earlier which failed. I could only grin sheepishly at that point and go home, tail between my legs.

So Wednesday night I restored everything from my backup (to a separate subdirectory, of course, since I now have plenty of room) and since Thursday, I've done a lot of reinstalling of software. I even decided to go for broke and upgrade to SP2 Thursday afternoon! It seems to be OK. I still have a way to go, but the important stuff is done, including restoration of all my OtsDJ data. It pays to have your music triplicated (on a desktop + 2 laptops)!

I ask you the all-important question:

What backup software do YOU use? Will it back up your data to an external HD? Do you find it easy to do incremental backups and, if you have to restore some files, is it easy to find a specific version of a file? What do you like about your backup software? What don't you like about it?

Inquiring minds want to know. I had bought Retrospect because of a stellar review of it way back when, but I'm thinking that a restore should have been easier than this one was.

Hey Brian :sqlaugh:

I use Genie software, and TrueImage.

They both run each night, and backup to multiple drives. So I then have a full file by file backup that's easy to restore via Genie, and a complete image of the drive via TrueImage. They are stored on separate external drives.

I've given up on backing up to DVD after that. The amount of time it takes, plus the media cost, just makes it easier and cheaper, to buy a new drive once a month, and archive the backups.

I keep all important stuff (source code), synced on a large flash drive on my keyring.

Bryan, I'm saddened to hear. Thankfully, HDD failures are few these days. Back in the day they were more common, especially so with cheaper OEMs like Packard Bell. :eek:

We back up our important files to CDR. Shirl also has an external HDD that holds all her stuff. She does a lot of image restoration work.

Good luck with it, my friend. :)

Hard drive failures are not a matter of IF they will fail its a matter of When & How, Hard drives have a 100% failure rate, face it, it is like a piece of delicate machinery running about 7200 RPM's for many many hours at times.

Backing Up Software: Acronis True Image comes to mind for system drives, as for storage I just copy all the contents to another drive.

I have seen many many hard drives fail at my place of employment for many different reasons, jolts, power issues. Most common is the "click" "click" "click" sound that gives a tail tail sign of a failing or failed drive. The sound is the heads clicking together. Not very elegant IMO :(

Sorry to hear your story about tech support. Next time contact me, as I am constantly building, fixing, upgrading custom PC's & "CPS" systems.

Acronis I believe its called. I keep a copy of it on my external with all my DJ programs set up so that if I ever have to reformat there will be no problem. Sorry to hear about your problems bro.

Bryan : My disaster recovery plan starts with the initial hard drive set up.

The machine's drive is first partitioned. There's a 10gb C:\ partition for the OS, all the programs, and basic folders such as My Documents, My Favorites, etc but anything else such as My Pictures, My Videos, My Music, or any other "stuff" is directed to the D:\ drive partition.

Once the C:\ drive is system and programs loaded and set exactly the way it should be, a program called Norton Ghost is implemented (an older version 6 with a DOS boot disc with both USB and Firewire drivers in the autoexec.bat and config.sys lines).

Ghost boots immediately after the BIOS load but before any OS activity with its own program at less the 640k, and allows the user to select a drive, or a partition within the drive, and back it up, not as a copy of the data, but as a sector by sector clone. With the USB and Firewire drivers, that cloned file can be placed on an external drive or actually burned to a CDR.

By keeping only critical OS functions and programs on the C:\ drive, cloning a 10gb drive might take all of 15 minutes. Now you have an exact cloned image of the drive.

In your specific case, your drive goes south. Take it out, throw it away, install a new drive, partition it, grab the Ghost image drive, boot up with the Ghost boot disc, and in 15 minutes EVERYTHING is back on the new drive PRECISELY as it was the last time you made a Ghost image.

Installing a new program? Make a Ghost image first. Then reboot, install the program, and see how it goes. Does it f-up your machine? No problem, boot into Ghost, put your machine back EXACTLY as it was before. This totally eliminates the need for setting Restore points in the OS which only goes back to a previous registry setting but does nothing to remove orphaned files, thus System glut.

Before heading out on Friday to show-biz land, the Ghost backup procedure is faithfully maintained if nothing has changed on the machine that week.

For the non-OS effecting files (.vob, .mp3, .jpg, .*.*) that has nothing to do with the system's operation, those files (generally all stored on the D:\ drive), are simply copied to the external using the the standard OS copy commands.

I use this Ghost program to clone every computer in my arsenal.

I use Casper XP to backup my drives.

Hearing your story makes me want to do things differently. I am currently using a SATA drive (120 Gb) on port 1 for the primary OS. I am going to get a second one and put it on port 2 and Casper the primary over. If the primary should fail, I'd just have to change the boot order in the bios and be back up and running. Oh, and get another drive to replace the failed one.

Some computer systems with lots of storage (usually over 120 gigs) are configured in a RAID. Which means your connecting two or more physical drives to make one virtual drive in windows. Users experience not only more storage but faster read and writing times because of this. "However with great power comes great sacrifice" a RAID 0 (Yes they have number and can also be combined with other numbers) configuration if you lose one drive, you lose everything! So backup backup backup!

You can find out more about your hard drives in windows by going to my computer, clicking on manage, and selecting disk management in the tree on the left.