My Hard Drive Would Never Fail

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I powered up my PC a few days ago and it gave me a very blank stare. Actually, it had one small message for me: operating system missing. Hmmm, that did not sound too good.

I investigated further…booted the computer from a CD. Did “chkdsk” which told me my hard drive was Missing in Action.Lucky for me, I had just backed up the My Documents folder a few days earlier, so in theory I had all of the important stuff saved away. After messing around with the computer for a while, I came to the conclusion that I would have to format the hard drive and reload everything. Even then, I wasn’t sure the format was going to work….maybe the hard drive was totally dead.

It turned out the format worked and I spent the next couple of days reloading Windows XP (thank goodness I found the recovery CD that shipped with the computer). Then I reloaded the My Documents folder without any trouble. The thing I miss the most right now is my email address book, which disappeared. I have an older copy backed up somewhere so I’ll try to reload that one. In the future, I’ll add the address book to the backup strategy.

I count myself lucky that I had all the docs backed up but it is still a major pain to reload Windows XP and all of the applications. It will be weeks before I get it all done.

73, Bob K0NR

3 Replies to “My Hard Drive Would Never Fail”

  1. While not exactly the same, I subscribe to Carbonite, a web based backup that takes all of my new files in all the folders I designate, and stores my stuff. Includes My Documents — and a whole lot of other files.

    We bought a new laptop, loaded the application programs onto the new laptop — and then downloaded all of the data files on the backup to the new machine. Two days, all done.

    Amazon also has a complete backup service; one that I will probably use when my subscription runs out with Carbonite.

    This stuff is not only important, but compared to a year or two ago, much less expensive. Like $50 per year for the the service. Not $200 for the service.

    I’ve had four hard drives fail and have purchased at least 6-7 computers in my ham career (we have three PC’s right now). This type of service has become another “must have” service — just like virus protection.

    Don’t wait for the disaster to happen…get the back up service. You’ll be glad you did.

  2. http://k9zw.wordpress.com/2007/05/14/macbook-is-ill/

    http://k9zw.wordpress.com/2007/10/30/macbook-with-new-harddrive/

    I’ve had the hard drive in my Macbook die twice (not Apple’s fault, as they were aftermarket larger capacity drives I added) and have had the XP-Dell Laptop do death throughs once too.

    Jotted quite a bit of notes on straegies to minimize the pain of a hard drive or full computer loss at:

    http://k9zw.wordpress.com/2007/10/30/time-machine-on-macbook/

    http://k9zw.wordpress.com/2007/10/31/macbook-rebuild-applied-to-shack/

    http://k9zw.wordpress.com/2007/03/11/making-a-list-checking-it-twice-checklists-screen-shots-for-amateur-radio/

    73

    Steve
    K9ZW

    http://k9zw.wordpress.com/

  3. I decided to use Carbonite based on a number of positive recommendations. Seems to work just fine. Of course, the real test comes on the next hard drive failure 🙁

    73, Bob K0NR