Topic: Hard drive woes

[Clive]

I suspect my hard drive on my main computer has packed in.  When I tried to boot it up this morning it only got as far as the "Loading Windows" screen and then stopped with an error message to say Windows had not loaded properly.  A strange clicking noise could be heard coming from the case.  I've taken it to my usual repair shop and they suspect the stepper motors on on the HDD have failed and I will need a new one.  They were supposed to be taking a look at it and leaving a message on my answer phone this afternoon but I've not heard anything yet.   

[Rik]

If it's getting that far, Clive, my instinct would be a bad sector.

[Simon]

Have you got your data backed up, Clive?

[Clive]

Er...  yes.  I have Acronis but my last backup is several months old.     Still, it's much better than nothing at all!

[Simon]

Well, sorry to hear of your troubles, but thanks for reminding me to do a long overdue backup!

[Clive]

A wise decision Simon!   

[sam]

could you set it up to do daily incremental backups with that? schedule it and never worry?

[Rik]

Or invest in a Clickfree external USB drive, which does an automatic incremental backup (of several machines) just by plugging it in.

[Clive]

That sounds a very good idea!  I'll look into that possibility.

[Simon]

Does 'incremental' mean that it only updates files that haven't changed, or new ones added?  One reason I don't do them very often is that it takes so long overwriting everything from the previous backup. 

[Rik]

Yes, incremental backups are just the changes from the last backup.

[Clive]

The repair shop has replaced the 80 Gb hard drive  with a 200 Gb.  They asked me for my external drive and also my Acronis discs and confirm that my full backups were successful.  But they are having problems transferring it to the new drive.   

[Rik]

The Acronis b/u stores the MBR if I am right, Clive, so it gets upset when the HD changes. They should be able to open the backup and copy files manually if that's the case.

[Clive]

Ah right!  They said that they could do that if all else fails.  When I left them they were trying to transfer the backup to a spare HDD and then transfer it from that to my new HDD.  Interestingly, they said that I am the first customer to have ever taken a mirror image of their HDD and were most impressed.  Doesn't seem to have done me much good though!   

[Rik]

You can't beat mechanical failure, Clive, that's why we backup, don't we Simon.