I got a failing HD warning !

[Brian Gaff]

Check the power and data connections then rerun the test if the same then I'd definitely back up important stuff. I know we all really should do this more but we don't do we? Brian

[Brian Gaff]

Yes expect at least two full days sorting out the mess, but its probably less than the week you will spend reconstructing it from scratch. The other option is to get an old pc and use it to duplicate most of the data and then with data in more than one machine it tends to be less hassle. Most of the failures I've had have been brought on by dodgy power connectors or in one case a dying mother board disc controller. its actually very seldom a drive goes gradually, they tend to just go phut and are full of errors. Thats been my experience. Brian

[F Murtz]

Whoever made the new drive usually has cloning software that makes it easy I know seagate has.you usually do not have to hunt for third party software.

[Brian Gaff]

I'd be very wary of any cloning solution that works with windows actually running as windows will be updating the registry and other files as you are moving them. The best solutions set up the basics in Windows, ie what you are going to do what you need ie bootable tc and should it clone the low level info identifying the drive, then you boot to either a cd and floppy or ramstick which means you are running in a low level dos type environment and no changeds should take place from what was present on the shut down of the system. Brian

[Martin Brown]

Very. There is still some time, but get anything on there that you are really fond of off onto a memory stick ASP and/or burned and *verified* to CD/DVD and preferably both.

An external USB HD with backup software might be a good choice for the imaging the entire disk image at this stage. Shame HD prices have gone through the roof at the moment, but I would suggest you don't wait for the January sales or you may not need to buy one.

The next stage is when the Windows swap file or something else critical becomes unreliable and then things get really hairy. I saw a machine once with defective HD that took over an hour to boot. Someone had disabled the SMART HD warnings because they got in the way. It didn't live long after booting. Trying to do almost anything crashed it.

Regards, Martin Brown

[Paul D Smith]

"Mike P the 1st" wrote in message news: [e-mail]...

Back up now while you still can. If possible, connect an external hard drive or use a network attached device (or second PC) without turning off the PC.

You are VERY lucky to get this warning because normally they silently appear in a Windows log which nobody ever reads - probably the most stupid Windows bits IMHO (and it's a big field to choose from!).

Back-up now, purchase a new HD, clone the old one, swap and relax. Or you could ignore the warning, let the disk die, lose everything and spend weeks reinstalling everything on a new hard drive.

BTW do you have all the required install disks in case you ever did need to do this? Many manufacturers don't ship install disks and you are expected to burn your own on receipt of the new PC.

Paul DS.

[Bob Eager]

Not necessarily. I use an inexpensive cloning program, and it does it fine. It uses the Volume Shadow Copy Service, which basically eliminates the problem. On FreeBSD, I use FFS snapshots, which are basically the same thing (but have been around rather longer).

Yes, it'll miss later changes, but those changes will be minor and unimportant, assuming you don't actually do any real work while the cloning is taking place.

[Mike P the 1st]

On Mon, 19 Dec 2011 09:47:23 -0000, "Paul D Smith" gently dipped his quill in the best Quink that money could buy:

I have a few install discs .. drivers etc from when the machine was new. No OS (XP) discs though. Looking at all the good advice I am getting from here, I feel more relaxed about it all and I will start immediately backing up and getting geared up for the cloning process onto a bigger HD.

Mike P the 1st

[GB]

I can back up all my real data onto a 4 gig pen drive - and do so every night. It would still be a gigantic PITA to rebuild the system though. That's the main reason I use RAID 1. I've had 3 disk failures on the systems at home, and each time RAID has saved me a lot of work.

[Man at B&Q]

Bollocks. We do it all the time here on a range of Dell boxes.

MBQ

[Dave N]

Brian Gaff wrote, on 19/12/2011 08:46:

I don't think you've understood how Clonezilla works. It cold-boots into Linux and then uses a Linux application to clone the manually-selected source disk as a ghost image on a manually-selected destination hard disk (e.g. a USB connected HDD). If it doesn't recognise the file system on the source disk, for example if it is encrypted, it carries out a byte-by-byte clone of the whole disk.

Once that has been done, you can use the cloned image to restore either onto the original hard disk or onto another replacement hard drive which must be at least as large as the original drive from which the image was taken.

The cloned image is a complete backup of *everything* on the source disk including the Master Boot Record. It doesn't use Windows(tm) or MSDOS(tm) in any way and that makes it trivially easy to generate and restore a Windows(tm) disk image.

[Andy Champ]

24 hours have passed (well nearly). Did the backup complete?

Andy

[Mike P the 1st]

On Mon, 19 Dec 2011 01:36:19 +0000, John Rumm gently dipped his quill in the best Quink that money could buy:

Is the external drive to remain in its box when fixing into the PC for good ?

Mike P the 1st

[Cash]

Tim,

Whilst that is okay (and very sensible) for businesses - perhaps "cloud" storage using sites like

may be better for the 'home' user with lots of photos, treasured documents, music files etc. using either the free 2gig plan (or the 50 gig for £4.99 or 125 gig for £7.99 plans [both payable per month]) and always accessible.

(BTW, I have no association with them other than a link that was supplied with the paperwork on a 500gig external hard drive that I bought a few years ago). Yes I did subscribe to the 'free plan' at that time, but never used it, choosing instead to stay with my then ISPs free backup offering.

Now after giving up the business some years ago (and not now needing highly secure storage), I simply back up only my very important files to memory sticks and good quality DVDs and a 500 gig external hard drive [1] - all the rest I can reinstall from scratch if need be (usually once a year using a disk clone for my OS and drivers).

[1] Using the three different storage mediums gives me more than adequate safe storage (along with two other computers if necessary [although SWMBO usually objects when I start filling the hard drive up on the computer she uses, with some rather large files before reformatting my computer]).

Cash

[John Rumm]

Nope - the box is just a way to plug in another hard drive to the laptop since they don't usually have internal space for two drives. In fact it does not even need to be a "box" as such, one of the USB to IDE/SATA adaptor leads alone will do - I have a pile of those such that I can plug random drives into a laptop to clone them etc.

The drive you take out ought not be trusted for regular use (even for backup) however it will serve as a level of backup for a short time while you are installing the new drive etc. For future use, getting a second and third drive to keep as externals and use for regular backup would be a sensible precaution.

[John Rumm]

Cloud has its place, but it also has its limitations. Its currently still a very poor solution for "disaster recovery" scenarios where you want to restore a cloned image of a whole machine quickly and easily, since you are typically limited in internet access speed to make lobbing hundreds of gigs about the place a non trivial exercise. For daily incremental backups of your working files however it can be quite good.

Its also easy to underestimate the time and effort required to rebuild a machine if you have to reinstall from source disks. Each app can take significant time, and that is before you get to reinstate all the configuration tweaks that you did the first time (if you can remember them!)

[Tim Watts]

I don't trust "cloud" sites - unless they come with a backup regime with an SLA (many don't). Better than nothing, but I wouldn't rely on one.

I do have some of my photos on Google Photos, but I still maintain backups at home. What I've said is equally sensible for any user that cares about their data, not just businesses IMHO - especicially as so many people have digicams and don't print many of their photos.

I've seen a student nearly in tears as their USB stick that they kept *all* their work on, broke, physically. Despite the fact that we gave them each a

1GB home directory with triple backups (local disk2disk, dis2disk at other end of campus, and tapes stored ina fire resistant safe).

They were lucky in that one of the technical guys managed to disassemble it, solder the connector back on and it worked.

Computer science student too - not a woofty "meedja" one!

Cheers,

Tim

[Bob Eager]

+1. I once had to recover a corrupted floppy with the *only* copy of someone's Ph.D. thesis on it - they'd been using the same floppy for two years, every day.

I give the first year students a large chunk of one of their Computer Systems lectures on backup. Mostly mechanisms and strategies, but then quite a bit about how it applies to THEM - with cautionary tales.

[Huge]

Some plonker at a PPoE left an 8" floppy on a window ledge in the sunshine, with several years work on it. It had gone all crinkly. Fortunately, we had some specialist hardware for reading floppies, so I put the disk itself in a new jacket, set the floppy disk machine to retry many times and left it clanking away on this crinkly floppy. We got the vast majority of his work back.

Huge's Three Rules of Backup;

1. Make backups.
2. Make backups.
3. Make backups.

This is quite amusing, too;

[polygonum]

I worked in a place where a large proportion of the staff edited word processor documents directly on 3.5" floppies. Despite having loads of megabytes of free disc space - and networking. Needless to say, they regularly lost documents because they were corrupted - as well as damaged floppies.