Spent Memorial Day weekend recovering from my first hard drive crash. Thought I'd mention a couple things that might help others in the perpetual quest to preserve data and system.
Good news is I recovered about 95% of my stuff using Maxtor One Touch 120GB external hard drive for my 80GB Western Digital hard drive.
It wasn't easy. It took a lot of time. But it beats having to start all over reinstalling everything fresh.
My goal was to completely backup my entire 80GB hard drive with one operation combining applications and files. This worked pretty well.
The catch, and there always is a catch, is this does not include the operating system, Windows XP. I had to first reinstall XP from original disk to my new hard drive. Trouble is, my XP was the 2002 version that did not include the SP1 and SP2 and all the fixes since then.
Nevertheless, got XP installed and it even updated itself with a few minor fixes. But the update program clearly didn't recognize that I lack so many updates. Even had to find and install SP1 manually.
I had to do that because I needed the SP1 drivers for a PCI card I installed with four USB 2.0 ports. My computer had only the USB 1 ports which are WAY too slow for restoring files. Was ploughing along at 95MB/min until installed the USB 2.0 ports and jumped to 1239 MB/Min!
Restoral speed varied greatly during the overall process, but again be sure you have and use USB 2.0 ports and not the old USB 1 ports.
Would have been nice if I had installed the USB 2.0 PCI card before the hard drive crash. The card included a driver disk, which in Catch 22 fashion said the XP drivers were included with XP SP-1, which I lost in the hard drive crash.
That's why I had to do that extra time-consuming gyration.
Neither are the Maxtor external hard drive instructions anything like intuitive. The technician at CompUSA couldn't get the restoral to work until I got out the manual and carefully waded through the restoral process. It worked fine, but was not easy to understand.
I had a lot of anxiety during the long restoral process, especially when the first results seemed to indicate I lost a lot of data. Then I scoured the directory some more and found that half of my data was still on the external hard drive.
I suppose expert users know all this, but I doubt most computer users do. Would have been nice if Maxtor did a better job of explaining exactly how its process works, including something as elementary as depending on backup size, multiple fetches may be required.
The Maxtor external hard drive worked like a champ in the weekly backup sessions I scheduled it for. Over the years I came to take it for granted, and fortunately it came through great.
No crash recovery disks, no multiple CDs, just one external hard drive. AND the original operating system XP CD.
A major caveat is this kind of restoral supposedly works only on the system that had the crash. Can't restore the total system backup to a different computer. That was fine with me. Apparently with a newer or different computer can restore files fine but applications naturally need new handshakes.
As always, crucial files need immediate backup in several places, e.g., print, flash drive, or CD. But for a general safety net backup of total system, the weekly update on an external hard drive like the Maxton One-Touch certainly seems worth considering.
A major challenge is restoring the entire hard drive to the right place, especially if applications are included. I wound up restoring everything to My Documents.
Yeah, I can see you smirking (be nice, now). Obviously my program files are now several layers deeper than they should be.
But again, on the bright side, the applications still work. The easiest bandaid fix is finding them and then for the main ones putting shortcuts on the desktop.
If you have any questions, let me know. Didn't want to bog this down with too much stuff; it's long enough as is.
Oh, one more thing. Why did my hard drive crash after only two years and 11 months? It's the first hard drive crash I've ever had, and it was a well-regarded Western Digital.
I think it's because I took some advice to just leave my computer running all the time like a refrigerator. Less shock than turning on and off frequently, the theory goes.
Later on, some people on Aces High observed that might be true for higher grade commercial computer hard drives, but wondered if hard drives designed for home users are that robust.
I think the latter observation is correct, and I have returned to turning on the computer when I get up and turning it off when I go to bed. Never had a hard drive crash under that schedule.
My main remaining problem is getting Windows XP back fully updated. Its update site no longer examines my computer and tells me what updates I need.
Wandering around the Microsoft site is like a trip to Hell. A zillion problems, few of them mine, and the most similar lacking the fix I need. Ironic that the most pain in a restoral ultimately is with the operating system itself, even if it has performed nobly in letting me get back into operation this far.
