…who have either lost data without a backup or will in the future. As much as I hate to admit it, I belong to the first group (and also to the second). Yeah Yeah Yeah, I am an IT professional and should know better… But what do you do if hard disks get so big that the only solution is to back up to a hard disk that is just as unreliable?? I had just last week decided to move data to the disk that crashed (on Friday the 13th no less) because it was the newer one, and in a machine with a faster CD burner too…
Just my luck!! (needless to say, there will be no KastPod for a while)
UPDATE:
For those interested… On Friday the 13th, after I had moved a bunch of stuff — in the prior week — from my laptop onto the “booh disk” because this machine is newer and has a faster CD burner (so I could do some backups), I decided to check how fragged the disk was. I didn’t actually do a defrag, just had windows analyze the frag level. While it was doing that, the machine BSOD’ed on me. I have the exact error message written down somewhere in case you are interested. When I rebooted, I was greeted with a nice “Not a system disk or disk failure” message. NICE!! The first thing I could find was the manufacturer’s recovery disk, so I stuck it in the machine, just so I could boot it up and check the damage. It told me that (paraphrasing here) recovery could not continue becuase a hard disk wasn’t found. NICE!! X2… YIKES!!!
However, when I took the disk out and restarted the machine, it came back up as if nothing ever happened. After a big sigh of relief, I went to bed. The next morning, I was greeted by the same scary error message. Not a system disk or disk failure. Ok, I’ll admit… I freaked out! After regaining my composure… Thinking that I would just boot the machine from another hard drive and then check what was wrong with the drive that was now clearly dead, or at least not accessible to boot from, I reached for my stack of spare hard disks (yup, I have a whole stack of those). I opened the machine and much to my surprise, it didn’t have an (E)IDE controller, just SATA. Now SATA are the nicer disks, but not having another SATA drive, that didn’t do me any good.
Now I am not entirely stupid, I also have a little gizmo that is known as a “hard drive enclosure”. Basically it’s a little case that makes any internal drive an external USB drive. I grabbed one of my spare drives stuck it in the enclosure, connected it to a USB port and restarted the machine. And hey presto…. NOTHING!!! I swapped USB ports, checked the BIOS…. There was no way in hell, I was going to make this machine boot from a USB disk. Next time I buy a cheap computer, please slap me!
So I went to the store and 138 dollars later I was a 250 Gig SATA disk richer… Knowing the recovery CD of the machine wasn’t going to do it (because it relies on information that is on the hard disk that came with the machine — What are these manufacturers thinking??) I located my somewhat legal Windows XP CD. I say somewhat legal because I do own a legal version of XP, it’s somewhat legal because it’s already installed on another machine… But damn, I had to do something…
This is where the story goes beyond my 20 years of experience with computers. The install of Windows failed. I tried again and it failed again… at a different point in the install, but nevertheless… Now I was really… well… frazzled. Just to try something I unplugged the new disk from the motherboard (OK, in reality I janked the cable out). Reboot… As if by magic the old disk seemed to re-appear. HURRAY!!! Well, somewhat of a harray. Recognizing that the last shutdown wasn’t quite up to par, windows insisted on running a chckdsk. Probably not a bad idea, except that on a 160 gig drive, that takes forever. 55% through all the little checks and tests… POOF! The machine spontaneously rebooted. I treid again, same thing 55% and Blam!! So I decided to skip the check. The machine booted up and into Windows! Hurray!!!
Not really! Halfway into starting up the virus scanner it BSOD’ed again. So back to restarting it and letting window run chckdsk. Once again, at 55 percent it rebooted. The next boot I decided to stick the recovery disk in the CD drive… Don’t know why, but I did. Somehow that did the trick. It fixed the error on the disk, reinstalled Windows and… and this is most important, left all my data alone!!! Go figure!! All the tests I have performed so far, say that the disk is operating well within specs.
I am glad, because after spending almost 150 dollars I really need the IRS to cough up my tax-return and the files to file that baby are… I am not stupid! They are safely backed up to the new disk as well as on my laptop as well as on CD. Now all I have to do is reinstall my tax software.
