Hard Drive Failure ... Surprised Myself on Recovery

[maple1]

Did you try holding the button in? The odd time mine will lock up - I need to hold the power button in on mine for like 5 seconds before it powers down.

Good luck - these kinds of computer problems are very frustrating. On mine, I did get one of my clone XP drives re-activated, over the phone. Could not get it to activate over the net, even after double chekcing all my time & date stuff, which was a suggested fix. So I'm good yet for a while I hope.

 

[Dave A.]

Did you try holding the button in? The odd time mine will lock up - I need to hold the power button in on mine for like 5 seconds before it powers down.

That worked okay, holding the power button in. What didn't work was my reset button, which powers down and restarts with one push of the button (my system is custom built, off the shelf systems rarely have a reset button anymore).

Good luck - these kinds of computer problems are very frustrating. On mine, I did get one of my clone XP drives re-activated, over the phone. Could not get it to activate over the net, even after double chekcing all my time & date stuff, which was a suggested fix. So I'm good yet for a while I hope.

Glad to hear you got the XP working.
I think am getting the sense of what you're doing which is having hdd image backups of your working system ready, just in case of a problem. So am thinking about doing that sort of thing myself. Fortunately my win7 ultimate doesn't require activation, so that should remove one potential wrinkle.

The way my system is dying like it has -- twice now since the new Seagate hdd, am thinking it may be the hdd itself, failing momentarily.

 

[scajjr2]

A good program to run is Hitman Pro. You have the options when you run it for the first time to buy, try for 30 days or do a 1-time run. Hitman Pro will find malware other programs don't. Also run CCleaner, mainly the Registry Cleaner. I do every time after I install Windows Updates cause MS isn't too good at clearing out old/invalid registry info after updates have installed.

Sam

 

[DBNH22]

The way I have my PC setup is that I have one hard drive running the OS and apps and another storing my data. I don't really have a lot of data so once every other month I throw another two sata drive sin the system and copy the data over to them. Hooking the drive up to the motherboard directly allows for much faster data transfer than using an external usb drive. Once the data's been copied over the drives go back in storage.

I also like to keep a spare drive that is a clone of my OS drive. That way if the OS drive fails I can rip it out, pop in the clone and be up and running in about five minutes. Takes roughly 30 minutes to an hour to create the cloned disk using imaging software. I do this about once a year and I'm good to go.

Hard drives are cheap. I have about ten of them to shift around as needed. No need for cloud backup (which costs money) backup software or annoying recovery disks. I like to keep it simple. Simple works every time.

 

[maple1]

I also like to keep a spare drive that is a clone of my OS drive. That way if the OS drive fails I can rip it out, pop in the clone and be up and running in about five minutes. Takes roughly 30 minutes to an hour to create the cloned disk using imaging software. I do this about once a year and I'm good to go.

Hard drives are cheap. I have about ten of them to shift around as needed. No need for cloud backup (which costs money) backup software or annoying recovery disks. I like to keep it simple. Simple works every time.

Ditto all that. Except I have everything on one drive. And I use a USB HDD dock to clone. It does take a little while, but no more than an hour. I just pick an hour I won't be needing my computer & do it then. The dock makes it real easy, just plop a bare drive in & away you go, no enclosures or plugs to mess with & don't have to open up a computer. I rotate two bare drives.

Along with that I have a second HDD mounted, that I have Acronis do weekly incremental backups to. Plus when I think of it, I drag my 'data' folder over to a USB pendrive once in a while.

And I also now have 3 extra computers identical to my main one on the shelf. So I should be good for whatever happens, or about as good as I can be. KNOCK ON WOOD. There's just no substitute for redundancy.

I did find out one thing with my episode of last week - Acronis (I have ver.10) seems to clone better if you boot from the DVD & use that. I had a couple of occasions of it stopping before it got going with some kind of partition mismatching error when doing it from the C: drive.