99.99...% Recovered from Hard Drive Failure?

[Watty]

See my other recent posts on my difficulty in getting my system squared
away after a drive failure. So far unstoppable copier hasn't quite done,
it but I may know why. Possibly I missed a setting. However, I tried the
old drive again. The shop had gotten it up once long enough to copy just
about everything off of it, so I thought I'd give it a try.

It came up but needed to do a chkdsk, which took 10-15 minutes of
sorting out orphans and such. It now seems pretty much up and intact.
I'm about to make an image copy and save off to an external drive. I may
explore unstoppable again, but first to get the image saved. It's been
up for 2 hours.

My guess is the power supply hiccuped originally. When I brought it up
here, I removed the second and third hard drives.

 

[Daave]

See my other recent posts on my difficulty in getting my system
squared away after a drive failure.

Watty, please don't start new threads for the same issue. It makes it
*very* difficult for those who are trying to help you.

So far unstoppable copier hasn't quite done, it but I may know why.
Possibly I missed a setting.

I had never heard of this program before, but it seems interesting. At
any rate, it does not have imaging capabilities.

However, I tried the old drive again. The shop had gotten it up once
long enough to copy just about everything off of it, so I thought I'd
give it a try.

I don't believe you ever told us what was wrong with this drive. (Then
again, with seven or so simultaneous threads, it's possible you did, but
I never saw the description.) Is the drive *physically* bad? Or is it
just that the Windows installation became corrupt?

It came up but needed to do a chkdsk, which took 10-15 minutes of
sorting out orphans and such. It now seems pretty much up and intact.
I'm about to make an image copy and save off to an external drive. I
may explore unstoppable again, but first to get the image saved. It's
been up for 2 hours.

What program are you going to use to image the hard drive? There is a
free trial version of Acronis True Image available for download. If you
want something totally free, DriveImageXML is very good.

Then again, if your Windows installation is/was riddled with malware,
you should consider a clean installation of Windows; that's what I would
do. Note that you would not be able to copy your original Program Files
folder to the new hard drive; that won't work. Programs, unfortunately,
need to be *reinstalled*.

My guess is the power supply hiccuped originally. When I brought it up
here, I removed the second and third hard drives.

In the future, if your hard drive is physically healthy, but you need to
reinstall Windows, consider a Repair installation. This will keep all
your programs and data intact. See:

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

 

[Daave]

Other thoughts... Replies are inline.

See my other recent posts on my difficulty in getting my system
squared away after a drive failure. So far unstoppable copier hasn't
quite done, it but I may know why. Possibly I missed a setting.
However, I tried the old drive again. The shop had gotten it up once
long enough to copy just about everything off of it, so I thought I'd
give it a try.

It came up but needed to do a chkdsk, which took 10-15 minutes of
sorting out orphans and such. It now seems pretty much up and intact.

If your hard drive is physically healthy (is it?) and if all you needed
to do to fix your original problem was to run chkdsk (if so, I'm stumped
as to why the shop you took your PC to was unable to do the same), then
you may very well have fixed your problem! But it's important to let us
know in detail what's been going on.

I'm about to make an image copy and save off to an external drive. I
may explore unstoppable again, but first to get the image saved. It's
been up for 2 hours.

In my other post, I mentioned two imaging programs. However, the new
hard drive you purchased has its own cloning program. So, just follow
the instructions and you will be able to successfully clone your old
hard drive to the new one. Once you have your system the way you want
it, *then* image the hard drive. And it would be good to get into the
habit of regularly imaging your hard drive. This way, if you have any
serious problems with Windows in the future, you can easily and quickly
restore the most recent image and you'll be back in business. If you
don't create frequent images, make sure that at the very least you
frequently back up your data.

 

[Watty]

Watty, please don't start new threads for the same issue. It makes it
*very* difficult for those who are trying to help you.


I had never heard of this program before, but it seems interesting. At
any rate, it does not have imaging capabilities.


I don't believe you ever told us what was wrong with this drive. (Then
again, with seven or so simultaneous threads, it's possible you did, but
I never saw the description.) Is the drive *physically* bad? Or is it
just that the Windows installation became corrupt?


What program are you going to use to image the hard drive? There is a
free trial version of Acronis True Image available for download. If you
want something totally free, DriveImageXML is very good.

Then again, if your Windows installation is/was riddled with malware,
you should consider a clean installation of Windows; that's what I would
do. Note that you would not be able to copy your original Program Files
folder to the new hard drive; that won't work. Programs, unfortunately,
need to be *reinstalled*.


In the future, if your hard drive is physically healthy, but you need to
reinstall Windows, consider a Repair installation. This will keep all
your programs and data intact. See:

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

Perhaps. I find it something of the other way around. People give
incomplete answers, and I have to back out of a long thread to find what
I'm looking for. My experience is after threads get 4-5 msgs deep, they
are hard to follow. Additionally, people often dive into the middle and
start offering suggestions that are of now help. Furthermore, as the
posts become separate, new issues are available as topics that may
really profit others. In any case, I think this topic is over, and
thanks to all who participated.

 

[Watty]

No problem. I'll give it a try. See mixed comments below.

Other thoughts... Replies are inline.



If your hard drive is physically healthy (is it?) and if all you needed
to do to fix your original problem was to run chkdsk (if so, I'm stumped
as to why the shop you took your PC to was unable to do the same), then
you may very well have fixed your problem! But it's important to let us
know in detail what's been going on.

Yes, it seems to be fine; however, it died a week ago with Disk Boot
Failure Insert System Disk. (I had no idea what the sys disk was, but
figured it was the install CD. That didn't help, so I started checking
other ways.) I tried to start it repeatedly under different conditions.
For example, turn all off and wait. Zippo. I then put it on another
machine. Zippo. Posted msgs. All declared it dead.

A friend had good luck with a local shop with an XP problem, so I called
them. Yes, they might be able to help. They have several hardware tricks
they can use. $75 for a shot at it, and if they got it up they'd dump
everything to my external 500G drive, FreeAgent, Seagate, usb.
Surprisingly it came up immediately for them, so rather than take a
chance with it suddenly dying, they dumped the contents. I decided that
was the end of the story. I now had all my data, but asked if could
perhaps get the PC rolling with a new drive. He said, yes, try
unstoppable copier, a freebie. Install XP onto the new drive, and
useunstoppable to transfer the recovered files. So what do I have to
lose? Yes, I could have continued with them, but I thought I'd give it a
try. BTW, I happened into another shop afterwards, and just asked if
they do such things, save data from a bad drive. Yes, $100. He also shot
said if it didn't spin up, it would be $500 to get it off. The low
figure surprised me, but he reiterated it. $500? No thanks.

That never quite did it. My first attempt went awry. I had made a simple
mistake, so I tried again. This time it looked OK except there were a
few anomalies. Chief among them were the Start menu was titled the same
as the new install. How could that be I asked myself? I talked to the
tech guy at the shop, and he said I needed change some options in
unstoppable. BTW, I had another XP machine that I could work out copies,
etc., independent of the broken machine-drive.

After thinking about this, and he'd mentioned that it might be a power
supply problem, I thought why not just try the old drive again on my
semi-bonkered machine. Further why power all drives, so I disconnected
the others. Viola! It worked. Lots of chkdsk message, but it was now
working. Still is right now.

It might fail if I put the other two drives back, so right now I'm
setting things up now to copy the image using a Seagate DiscWizard,
which is a stripped down version of acronis. I plan to copy the c-drive
image of the semi-bonkered machine over to the new 320G disk drive. It's
320G, and I can use the space. The old drive only used 58G.

It doesn't look like I'm going to get to further plow into the use of
unstoppable, so I really don't know if it'll do the job. The tech guy
thought it would, but I really don't know if had done it before.

Any other questions?

 

[Watty]

I've now recovered fully to where I was pre-wreck, and my bootable drive
is now 320G instead of the old 80G.

Done.