iGotDataBack
A massive, massive thank you to all who responded on Friday. Especially to those who recommended I try GetDataBack. Through obtaining that I discovered BartPE, which allows you to run GetDataBack from a bootable "Windows" CD. This CD is now an invaluable part of my toolbox and I'd recommend you burn yourselves one right now just in case the worst should happen.
Here's one of the many recovered videos of Felix. He's clapping to say a big thank you (warning: contains full frontal male nudity):
Using BartPE and a USB HDD I managed to recover everything from the old drive. In fact I didn't even need GetDataBack in the end, as the A43 file manager that comes with BartPE was sufficient. Which makes me wonder why Knoppix was unable to even mount or see the device at all. Knoppix's inability to see the HDD and the reports of bad sectors are what made me initially think of giving up on it.
The two lessons I've learnt from this whole episode are first and most obviously to backup more regularly and more completely, but also to not give up on a "dead" HDD so fast.
While I'm over the moon that I got all my files and settings back (what a relief it was to see my Notes workspace once more!) there's a flipside to it in that I'd managed to convince myself it was actually a good thing it had crashed. It would force me to take a fresh start. My RSS subscriptions are too many and there are numerous files I'll never use, but can't bring myself to delete or don't have the time to sort through. A hard drive failure was probably the only way I'd ever get round to clearing out all the rubbish. I now feel ever so slightly disappointed that it's all come back.
Always wanting to look on the bright side of things like this (two days lost productivity and a weekend spent re-installing all the apps, registration codes and settings etc) I now have a "new" computer in effect. A brand new HDD with 50% more capacity and a fresh install of XP means my laptop, which was two years old this month, is back to running as smoothly as it ever did. Hopefully I've bought it another two years of life.
Once again, thank you.
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Now set up a little robocopy batch file to somewhere. ;-)
Something you may want to consider to protecet against loss is actually a windows consumer server "Windows Home Server" or WHS as it seems to have become.
It is designed mainly for multi PC families and backs up each pc over night, copy ever change since the last time it was used.
I have run a beta for a couple of weeks and it seems to work fine, I havent tried the system recobery option yet but plan too in the near future, for about £400 you get a backup device with plenty of other options as well.
Though perhaps you may decide to use a system with your other servers.
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Hey Jake, your son is adorable!!!!!
Congratz!
Alex
BartPE is great, I would definitely second your recommendation that everyone should add a copy to their toolbox. A few years back I was doing tech/repair work and it saved me on more than a few occasions. Another great one to have is the "Ultimate Boot CD" it boots up into a simple menu system and allows you to run a huge variety of bundled diagnostics. There's also some other handy utility programs in case you forgot a WinXP password or need to change some partitioning around.
Nice!
I gotta laugh... Felix treats cameras that come in range the same way our lil'uns did... "will that fit in my mouth??" he he...
Also second the second recommendation from Rich. Have and had used... very good set of tools.
Now that everything is fine again ... what are you going to do with your old disk? Now that you've how seen how dead dead can be.
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I still stand by my recommendation of Darik's Boot and Nuke. Since it's based on Linux, I wonder if it is as picky about the drive condition as Knoppix, but there's no reason to not try it, before taking out your hammer.
Nice vid Jake.....Strangely seeing that lovely fireplace in your lounge (house seems to be coming on nicely), I felt suddenly homesick....We have no need for such things here in Darwin!!
Jake, I recently bought myself network attached storage backup device: a Western Digital "MyBook" with 1TB of space for about $330 (from Costco in California). It comes with a reasonable backup program by EMC. Now I backup my systems every week. Just last week I was able to recover a number of docs accidentally deleted from a Notes DB (and of course the deletions had replicated all around).
Although the backup SW is not perfect, it allows you to store versions of your files, and then recover the file as it was on a particular day. That is what saved my bacon.
One nice thing about network attached storage as opposed to USB storage is that the disk can be in another room (they are quite noisy late at night!). Also, network attached storage can easily be used by multiple systems as a backup destination.
I can highly recommend a regular backup schedule - and doing it to a hard disk makes it bearable. By the way, I live in San Diego, southern California, and we had to evacuate our house last week with the wild fires. Instead of dismantling the computer I just grabbed the backup disk, and was able to take my 26,000 photos with me. When we returned home (the fires missed us by about 4 miles) I just connected the disk and was back in business a few minutes later.
Regards,
Chris
Thanks Alex.
Jerry. It's amazing what they manage to find laying about that they *can* fit in their mouths. Scary in fact.
Harkpabst. I'd not thought what to do it with long-term. For now it's in a box as a temporary backup. I'll give boot and nuke a go though when I get round to it. Then maybe I'll take the hammer to it just to be sure ;o)
NAS is one thing I am considering. Something needs to be done...
Jake
In various lives I've dealt with dead hard disks on numerous occasions. The tools here are all of use and in general, as long as the glass surfaces of the platters are not physically cracked or shattered (you would have to wilfully hammer them to achieve this) you should be able to get the data back. It's often the spindles that don't revolve correctly and one method I've heard of (but not personally tried) is to put the drive in the freezer for a few days to contract everything, which can give the drive a few minutes of life to get the needful off it.
I would strongly advise against relying on the failed drive again though - restore the data to another hdd, and then low-level format the original. Use the original for "Transient" data, like for dowloading p2p, but don't make it the central repository.
I've also been handed failed pen-drives (pure RAM) which lose the ability to keep the FAT in order (folders recurse) or just don't report their full space as being available. I've tried a few tools for these too but ultimately the problems come back quickly. I put this down to cheap chinese memory, so be wary - not all is made the same and you seem to get what you pay for.
BTW, RAM is fast becoming as cheap as HDD storage. Hands up if you never want a hdd failure again:
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