Laugh or cry - data management

[h0ughy]

I thought i would post this little gem.

I decided to backup my main laptop as I had not done it for a while and had added programmes and had important data retained on the HDD. This was in response to a IIS members request for help and information that I had only just gave him, which prompted me to undertake the action of backing up my HDD.

I regularly use and run Norton Ghost 9, so i had a spare 120gig 3.5 drive, so I just bought a 3.5 external case for 25 dollars and was set to undertake the backup.


turned everything on, formatted the backup drive ready for the process and then initiated nortons to do the lot.

Then it happened - my laptop HDD died:scared: How close can or could you get! lost the lot:doh:

ANyway the moral to the story - - there is none, just do your best and regularly back up your data;)

[[1ponders]]

You can't retrieve any of it? :sad:

[Striker]

Sorry to here David,

That was so close...talk about frustrating.

[netwolf]

Houghy you might want to give Spinrite frob Gibson research a try, if its not mechanical then it may be repairable. I usually keep a BartPE (like a windows livecd) that i boot from to retrive data from a non-booting but otherwise working disk. UBCD is another good one has some freeware tools on it that may help. Really depends what you mean by died.

I have recovered partial data from a drive that occasionaly produced a hammering noise and was unbootable.

Ghost is a great delpoyment tool but its not really what i would use for backup. Suggest you would be better of using your recovery disks from manufacturer and then doing a ntbackup of your system once configured to a backup file on an external usb drive. You can use something other than ntbackup if you wish. But this process has worked for me. Ofcourse you could use ghost to take a snapshot post rebuild to make reload of OS a faster.

Feel for ya mate I have been there to :(
Regards

[acropolite]

I've found that in many cases it's simply the platters that have stopped rotating, often removing the HDD and giving it a quick twist; the intertia of the platters together with the case rotating rapidly will free up the platters enough to allow it to start when reinstalled. In extreme cases I've taken the cover off and manually rotated the platters to free them.

[g__day]

If its not a heads are crashed situation you may be able to recover. A change of power supply - move the laptop, or secondly a firm but gentle shake might do something - it's where the term "boot the computer" originally camp from anyway - disk drives used to stick so you'd kick them,

[ving]

bugger hey... :(

[mickoking]

Spewin'. Thats a horrable thing to happen :(

[acropolite]

I understood that the term was nothing to do with kicking rather the term originally referred to "pulling ones self up by the bootstraps" the term referring to the process of bringing the system up with a small amount of code. In view of you problem huffy, I've just backed up my images to DVD, should have done it months ago.

[RB]

You're absolutely right Phil:

"Boot is also used as a noun for the act of booting, as in "a system boot." The term apparently derives from bootstrap which is a small strap or loop at the back of a leather boot that enables you to pull the entire boot on. There is also an expression, "pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps," meaning to leverage yourself to success from a small beginning."
SearchWinIT.com (http://searchwinit.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid1_gci211696,00.html)

But I suppose when the system crashs like that you do feel like giving it a good boot. ;)

[h0ughy]

thanks for the grammatical and helpful advice fellas, no dead as in tinkly sound when shaken, heard it explode and knew it wasnt economically viable to fix, new drive coming next month!

[C.]

That's rotten luck Houghy. Very sorry to hear it.

We had a power failure this weekend which somehow wrecked the power supply to my computer. It is fixed now, but for a while I thought I had lost all my recent photos of my beautiful new grand-daughter. I have now added a surge protector and will be madly making backup discs.

Be warned folks. It happens in the blink of an eye. Backup anything you don't want to lose forever.

[h0ughy]

I have 4 UPS's, never leave home without one. Turned to laptops because if the "inbuild" ups factor (battery and ac) and portability. Now I have 3 laptops and 5 normal PCs, two run linux (SUSE 10.1) windoews 98SE and win2k an the reast different flavours of XP.:screwy: