A Cautionary Tale

[Saab Dastard]

I just thought I would share with you all my current pain.

One of 2 PCs has just had a system disk failure.

Glad was I of my recent backups (both to PC 2 and external disk).

However, partner had been a lot less proactive, despite much nagging, so was very despondent about photos, documents etc.

Fortunately, Knoppix to the rescue came, and I seem able to recover all the data from the data partition.

BUT, I still have the irritating task of installing replacement disk, installing OS and all apps, and restoring individual configurations / environments for 4 family members.

This is the first time in almost 20 years that I have wished for a full system backup to tape!

So - it can happen, it probably WILL happen, and it is better to be prepared than sorry!

I may be a trifle busy over the next few days...

SD

[Bushfiva]

If it's any consolation on your absent tape backup, you'd have a 70% chance that it wouldn't restore anyway, apparently.

[PPRuNe Pop]

I know the problem so well SD. Which is why I now have three HDD's. I do a full system back up each month with Acronis and send one to each of my other two drives. I also back up OE every week with Acronis - takes but 3 minutes!

[Stoney X]

I've always viewed Raid as being the ultimate answer to this problem. Have two disks in a Raid 1 configuration. If one fails, replace it, re-sync it with the other disk, and you are back in business. With today's computing power and speed of disks it's highly unlikely you would notice performace degradation, even if you use software raid.

But as SD says, it if can happen it will, so while it's unlikely that both disk fail at the same time, it's still vital to backup your personal documents.

Regards

[Saab Dastard]

This turns out to have been a little more complicated and a little more interesting!

Yes, the hard disk had a problem, but it was by no means terminal - though I intend to replace it anyway.

Having backed up everything under Knoppix, I subsequently found that the hard disk would now boot after all - although disk access was painfully slow - and a file system check reported 2 index errors had been fixed.

Taking advantage of this good fortune, I ran the "Files and Settings migration" wizard for all the users of the PC, then cloned the C: drive for good measure, using ghost.

Then (but only then!!) I ran the Western Digital diagnostics - which found no problems with the disk at all!

Puzzled, I then ran CHKDSK /R to detect and fix any problems. Still none detected - but the disk was still running like a dog and Windows was like treacle - hardware interrupts into the 90% mark.

Then I recalled a problem I'd seen before, where Win XP had encountered errors on a disk and fallen back from Ultra DMA 5 to PIO - and not resumed DMA when the problems were fixed.

It was then a simple matter to dig out the registry fix for this and apply it - bingo, back to normal!

As I mentioned earlier, I'll be replacing the disk as a precaution (I wanted a bigger one anyway!).

I've put more information about this in another thread about Win XP running very slowly.

Hope this helps someone else!

SD

[SoundBarrier]

One little word about RAID. It is by no means a replacement for backups. I deal with this often where people use RAID as a backup and still lose weeks if not years of data.

With the Price of DVD burners, copying at least your photo's and documents to said media is a must.

Good luck and please backup! :)