chumley Posted July 17, 2015 Share Posted July 17, 2015 How's this for careless and stupid. A couple of days ago I decided to make some Images of various drives in my main system after hearing the woes of a friend who suffered a hard drive failure. I dutifully created the file and stored them, I thought, on a backup drive. Yesterday I started up my Pc and withing minutes knew all was not well when the system locked up and then the dreaded BSOD and my Windows SSD went wrong going into an irreversible, it seems, panic lock. No problems I thought, I have an image of this drive, I'll just get into the system with my boot disc and reload the image. Imagine my horror when I found the drive Image I needed wasn't on the backup disc and after a lengthy search finding it was on the very drive that had gone pear shaped. Even worse - all the others are on the backup disc. I now face quite a lengthy process reinstalling everything. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
birdguy Posted July 17, 2015 Share Posted July 17, 2015 Being somewhat anal retentive, after switching to SSDs for both the OS and FSX I left the 1 TB HD in just to store backups. Also have everything backed up on external hard drives. Noel Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Museumkeeper Posted July 17, 2015 Share Posted July 17, 2015 Microsoft One Drive. Backup all your files to this and you don't need to worry about your hardware. Kind regards Ian Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sammy H Posted July 18, 2015 Share Posted July 18, 2015 Concur! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
boetie Posted July 18, 2015 Share Posted July 18, 2015 Nothing like a fresh install to re-energise a system (but I feel your woes, you're only human). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
boleyd Posted July 18, 2015 Share Posted July 18, 2015 I use OneDrive for all my backups. However they limit you to 2gb per upload. A USB backup disk seems the best move. For max safety store it in your safe-deposit box at the bank. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chumley Posted July 18, 2015 Author Share Posted July 18, 2015 Nothing like a fresh install to re-energise a system (but I feel your woes, you're only human). I need a fresh install to re-energise my system . Never mind you live and learn. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chumley Posted July 18, 2015 Author Share Posted July 18, 2015 OK, I have Windows installed and AVG as my Virus Protection. I have loaded the requisite drivers from the motherboard disk and of course the last video driver that I downloaded and subsequently installed has now been installed. I just went into Windows update expecting a screen full and many MB of updates to download but only 8 were displayed (SP1 was not one of them) and a further one - the NET framework after installation and rebooting. There were another 10 or so 'Optional' but I didn't bother with them for the very reason they are optional. This has me a little confused as my other machine - also Win 7 currently has 14 waiting to be installed and that is after having installed a bucket load about a month ago when I set up the system. Is it normal? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bruce Hamilton Posted July 18, 2015 Share Posted July 18, 2015 For max safety store it in your safe-deposit box at the bank. Does you a lot of good when your system crashes Saturday afternoon and the bank doesn't open until Monday. A second or third copy stored that way would be good, but you need to keep one copy readily available. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jsapair Posted July 18, 2015 Share Posted July 18, 2015 My external 1TB usb drive just crashed with a half lifetime of pictures, etc, on it. Win7 doesn't see the drive. If I make it an internal drive my BIOS sees it but Windows still does not. Someone advised me to pull out my C: drive, replace it with the bad drive and boot to my Win7 disk. He said I may be able to access my files that way. Anyone ever heard of this procedure? I'll give it a go if I can ever find my Win7 disk. Can't hurt anything, right? What could go wrong? Famous last words. JJ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest M31 Posted July 19, 2015 Share Posted July 19, 2015 My external 1TB usb drive just crashed with a half lifetime of pictures, etc, on it. Win7 doesn't see the drive. If I make it an internal drive my BIOS sees it but Windows still does not. Someone advised me to pull out my C: drive, replace it with the bad drive and boot to my Win7 disk. He said I may be able to access my files that way. Anyone ever heard of this procedure? I'll give it a go if I can ever find my Win7 disk. Can't hurt anything, right? What could go wrong? Famous last words. JJ If its a mechanical hard drive that suffered a failure and I've had that too in the past, then you could try wrapping it up in some moisture free type wrap, put in the refrigerator for maybe 6 hours or more (I'd not recommend actually freezing it) immediately plugging it back in to PC and get extracting your precious data straight away, its not guaranteed to work but depending on the type of HD failure it can work and at least get some data back off a dead drive ... see here ... http://www.cnet.com/forums/discussions/hard-drive-in-freezer-question-245494/ As you can see from replies there, mixed results, but if you consider the drive dead, what have you to lose? You do this at your own risk of course though Goes without saying I'm almost religious about backing up data now and keep my important stuff on three separate drives, if one fails I'll buy a new one ASAP and this still gives me my data on two drives while awaiting the third to arrive, these are spread over three different PC's BTW. You can get more obsessive about off site back ups of course, the house could catch fire, but by then the last thing I'd be worried about were old family pictures or videos, but why not. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest M31 Posted July 19, 2015 Share Posted July 19, 2015 OK, I have Windows installed and AVG as my Virus Protection. I have loaded the requisite drivers from the motherboard disk and of course the last video driver that I downloaded and subsequently installed has now been installed. I just went into Windows update expecting a screen full and many MB of updates to download but only 8 were displayed (SP1 was not one of them) and a further one - the NET framework after installation and rebooting. There were another 10 or so 'Optional' but I didn't bother with them for the very reason they are optional. This has me a little confused as my other machine - also Win 7 currently has 14 waiting to be installed and that is after having installed a bucket load about a month ago when I set up the system. Is it normal? When I do a complete format these days I'll inevitably go on to the Microsoft site and download the latest ISO for my legit OS, these usually have most if not all the latest updates on the ISO that when converted to DVD or CD will install quicker than having to do Windows Update later and letting it check your system, go back and check to see what's available, report back to your machine and start downloading and configuring ... its perfectly legal to do, its the license your paying for and not your Microsoft OS disc and they approve ... even having Optic Fibre now it can take a while for MS Update to get it all back together ... its not so much the download time using MS Update its much better to have an up to date MS OS from their site and have all the latest MS updates installed at the beginning. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chumley Posted July 19, 2015 Author Share Posted July 19, 2015 When I do a complete format these days I'll inevitably go on to the Microsoft site and download the latest ISO for my legit OS, these usually have most if not all the latest updates on the ISO that when converted to DVD or CD will install quicker than having to do Windows Update later and letting it check your system, go back and check to see what's available, report back to your machine and start downloading and configuring ... its perfectly legal to do, its the license your paying for and not your Microsoft OS disc and they approve ... even having Optic Fibre now it can take a while for MS Update to get it all back together ... its not so much the download time using MS Update its much better to have an up to date MS OS from their site and have all the latest MS updates installed at the beginning. Didn't know about this option. Thanks for pointing me in the this direction. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jsapair Posted July 20, 2015 Share Posted July 20, 2015 If its a mechanical hard drive that suffered a failure and I've had that too in the past, then you could try wrapping it up in some moisture free type wrap, put in the refrigerator for maybe 6 hours or more (I'd not recommend actually freezing it) immediately plugging it back in to PC and get extracting your precious data straight away, its not guaranteed to work but depending on the type of HD failure it can work and at least get some data back off a dead drive ... see here ... http://www.cnet.com/...uestion-245494/ As you can see from replies there, mixed results, but if you consider the drive dead, what have you to lose? You do this at your own risk of course though Goes without saying I'm almost religious about backing up data now and keep my important stuff on three separate drives, if one fails I'll buy a new one ASAP and this still gives me my data on two drives while awaiting the third to arrive, these are spread over three different PC's BTW. You can get more obsessive about off site back ups of course, the house could catch fire, but by then the last thing I'd be worried about were old family pictures or videos, but why not. Thanks M31. That gives me another option, but the disk is spinning smoothly, just not being recognized by Windows. The disk activity light is flashing rapidly. When I turn it off it tells me I need to format the disk before I can use it so I suspect I lost my formatting or a partition. I'll try the other option of putting the drive in internally in place of my C;drive and booting to my Win CD, which I just found. Hopefully I can get to a command prompt and fdisk/mbr, but, if I still can't see the drive I'm pretty much toast. I'll post my results the next day or so. Wish me luck. JJ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jsapair Posted July 22, 2015 Share Posted July 22, 2015 No joy. With the bad drive installed in place of my C: drive it won't even boot to the Win CD...hangs everything up. I unplugged it and it booted to the CD. Plugged it back in but it just takes me to the installation screen. I can get to My Computer under the driver installation but it still doesn't recognize the bad drive. I give up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wharfedaler Posted August 1, 2015 Share Posted August 1, 2015 Don't give up, if the worst happens there are nice people who can extract everything (for a price). You would be surprised what can be retreived even from a reformatted drive! I have had so many rogue disks I could build a house for my cat, but I have kept most of them as I can usually retrieve most of the data when a new drive fires up and my tower allows a bay to be used for surgery. After that i reformat and store non essential data on it. I am in the process of doing that (again) right now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chumley Posted August 2, 2015 Author Share Posted August 2, 2015 Don't give up, if the worst happens there are nice people who can extract everything (for a price). You would be surprised what can be retreived even from a reformatted drive! I have had so many rogue disks I could build a house for my cat, but I have kept most of them as I can usually retrieve most of the data when a new drive fires up and my tower allows a bay to be used for surgery. After that i reformat and store non essential data on it. I am in the process of doing that (again) right now. Take it to the police and with the right perceived incentive they will recover the data. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wharfedaler Posted August 6, 2015 Share Posted August 6, 2015 Take it to the police and with the right perceived incentive they will recover the data. Superb idea, the MOD also have very capable people, but you are likely to end up behind bars. Seriously though, I have had occasion to use an expert service and they saved me weeks of lost work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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