My hard disk crashed last night. In a way, I was expecting it as we've just moved and the PC got moved around more than most items. I was actually prepared for it, I had a backup and recovery program which made weekly incremental backups.
That was not the problem. Things started going weird from there. I have three hard disks on the PC: the system disk; the data disk; and a Linux system disk. (For one reason or another I have not been able to access the two other disks when using Linux. I have not had time to experiment on it.) These are three physical disks with single partitions each. So I am pretty sure that the chances of a hard disk crash for all the disks at the same time is very slim indeed.
First thing I did, once I found out that I couldn't boot up on my primary, I tried to reboot using Linux. But since it was riding on top of Windows, it did not boot up. Just a lot of hard disk activity.
Next, since I have the backup program, I tried to find the recovery CD first. And since we've just moved and the data CDs have not yet been taken out of the boxes, I have not had the time to do a cursory (ocular?) inventory. On the first pass, I wasn't able to find the recovery disk. I had to resort to the OS install. Booting up from the install disk, I ran into an error message I have not encountered before: a blue screen with a short message, the gist of which was "hardware error" with a hex number on the next line. No other line followed.
At which point, I tried to change the hard disk data cable connections, doing different permutations, taking out one hard disk, changing BIOS settings, changing boot up settings. I had to have a break. To calm down as it was getting to be very frustrating and I was on the verge of a panic attack. I didn't have the time, nor the energy to fix a big problem. That would have to wait till the next weekend.
After watching some TV, and some snacks (corn puffs), I went back to the CDs. Finally found the recovery CD, and was able to start work on the data recovery. Insert the CD, boot, choose the backup file and wait. After a relatively long wait, which should have felt like a short wait, the system disk was recovered and the PC was able to boot up just fine. However, it turns out that the last full back up I had was last December, with weekly incremental backups. I had to mount the last incremental backup (made the evening before we moved). This made the backup a virtual drive. And I had to copy the files from there to the system disk, which turned out to take much longer. I copied several folders last night. And I will have to copy several more till I can get to where the PC was two weeks ago.
All in all, a much shorter exercise than prior experience with hard disk recovery. But it could have been a much shorter procedure, if the full backup was more recent.
Once all of the recovery is done to my satisfaction, I would have to set the full backups on a more frequent schedule.
--Andoy
5 May 2008
