HDD died - recovery ?

[Bob Eager]

Which is the point I was making.

[Tim Streater]

It doesn't matter if you do leave it to back up every hour. It's doing incremental backups.

[therustyone]

Windows can get fussy about access permissions. If a MAC sees it and Windows doesn't is this when plugged into a USB adapter. Check out "win 7 disk permissions" in Google.

[pamela]

Which company was that?

[The Natural Philosopher]

Had a weird situation last might with a USB drive. I unplugged it ftom one machine and plugged it into another. IT wasnt there.

Was on the first machine.

I rebooted the second, and plugged it in - and there it was!

[Weatherlawyer]

[whisky-dave]

Yes I thought it was but others are somewhat slower so the comment was for them really. I backup when I feel I need to, which is when I have done som ething that needs backing up. Just browsing the web or answering emails I d on't have to back up every hour or day or even week once a month is usally enough.

[Clive George]

I have automatic backup of important stuff every two hours, so I don't need to worry about remembering to do it.

[Bob Eager]

I do a complete automatic off-site backup of all important stuff every night, too. Easy and cheap (using tarsnap).

[Davey]

When I make a change to an address book, I export it to Documents, ditto my Lightning calendar. Every night when I shut down, I run an rsync script, which backs up my e-mail, Documents, Downloads, and Pictures. Then it shuts the PC off for the night. The backup goes to an attached USB drive, and the Documents also go to another PC on my network, at the other end of the house.

[rick]

The cloud is backed up and multiple redundant scenarios .... OK it may glitch at some point but it will not lose your data. Like it or not its the way storage is going .......... Amazon is huge in Cloud storage business.

Unfortunately my experience proves otherwise ... first Caviar black lasted 3 weeks It's replacement failed after 3 years (current failed drive)

Yes I could buy another 2 and put a full RAID array in ... but if I put it external to my PC ...over Ethernet it will be slow. I could have the RAID hardware in my PC......... but then puts huge risk factor as a single point of failure ... Difficult to know which way to go.

[rick]

might try this weekend ...... last time I did command line stuff was on my Unix sys admin course in 1995 !

[rick]

Without the disk being 'seen' by Disk Manager how will the tools work ?..... or am I missing the point.

I tried RECUVA for example ........ first thing you have to do is select drive, C, D, E etc. ...as mine doesn't come up I could not select it.

[Clive George]

If it really can't see it, yes, you'll get nowhere - but the software I've been playing with doesn't ask for C/D/E, because the drive won't mount. It asks for the disk though - but if Linux can see it, Windows should be able to too.

But the point was to try it because it's not hard, doesn't cost anything, and if it does work you've won. If it doesn't work, not a problem.

[Davey]

In my case, it not only won't mount, it isn't seen at all. And the blurb for Data Rescue PC specifically mentions failure to mount, not failure to be seen. So in my Linux case, it's no help at all.

[The Natural Philosopher]

No. you are not.

If the drive isn't recognised as a drive at all, there is some weirdness in the electrics, not the actual hard drive.

Possiblyt a broken wire.

That when you start thinking of swapping the actual disk platter assembly into a working drive of the same type

[swldxer1]

I had to bin two Acer Aspire S7s due to HDD failures. Third one I bought was a SSD 500GB job - problem solved.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Why didn't you put new disks in them?

[NY]

I spent a hour or so yesterday looking at a laptop that was exceptionally slow: it booted to the desktop but then stopped responding - so much so that I couldn't even run Task Manager to see whether any processes were hogging the CPU.

In desperation, I booted to Safe Mode and uninstalled the anti-virus (Norton) which I've found in the past can occasionally run amok. Having removed and reinstalled it, the PC was working fine. I was all set to call it a day, with loads of kudos earned, but first I wanted to reboot after re-installing Norton.

And that's when the fun started. As it was shutting down there was a blue screen error (it didn't stay on screen long enough to read it) and then the dreaded "cannot boot from PXE network" error, which means that it can't find boot info on the hard disk and it's trying for remote boot.

And sure enough the disk, which had been working fine, was as dead as a dodo - it was spinning but when I connected it as a second drive in my own laptop, no partitions or filesystems were visible.

What was frustrating is that while the PC was working I'd started to back up the user's files, but it was going to take about an hour and she said "don't bother". If only I'd continued I'd at least have preserved her photos.

Moral: always back up a hard disk while the PC is working, even if the worst that can happen is that the PC will not be able to boot, just in case the hard disc fails totally and you can't access the data even as a slave drive rather than a bootable Windows drive.

[Simon Mason]

I had all my files backed up on a 2TB hard drive and if I need to access them I simply plug it into my SSD Acer.