Harddrive Failure...

Yesterday when I got home all I saw on my screen was the standard "Failed to find Harddrive 0 No boot device found Press F1 to retry or F2 to enter setup" (something like that you get the point) and all I heard was CLICK, CLICK, CLICK, ..., CLICK. My hard drive had failed. Just great!! Luckily most of my data was stored on my file server so I didn't lose everything. Just my email for the past few months (so if you have emailed me in the last couple days an are expecting a reply please kindly resend your message) and my programing settings. I used to actually setup my profile to run from my server but I got lazy the last time I installed my system. Needless to say I won't make that mistake this time.

I looked up my warranty for my Dell system and it just expired last month, well crap. So for the time being I transfered the files from a secondary drive in my server and I'm using it for now. So I'm mostly backup and running now with a few exceptions.

I was putting off installing .NET Framework 2 beta 2 because I had to go through the pain of doing all the uninstalls but now since I have a fresh system I figured I would go ahead and install it along with C# Express Beta 2. Of course that would prevent Run++ from running, because it was built running .NET Framework 2 Beta 1. I opened up my project in C# Express Beta 2, which worked fine and I must say I like it better so far. However the project no longer compiles. Once I got some references straightened out I only had 2 errors and 98 warnings to go. Most of the warnings are things that are becoming obsolete, including a bunch of stuff that was just added in Beta 1, go figure. At any rate I'm working on getting Run++ up and running on .NET Framework 2 beta 2. I will post more about my transition from beta 1 to beta 2 after I finish the process.

Also as I have mentioned in previous posts I have started running as non-admin on my machine, but there are a lot more problems to deal with when you have a fresh install verses an already installed machine. Right now I'm trying to work out an issue with an application that is failing to register a dll properly.

Fun, Fun, Fun!

5 Comments

  • Sorry about the failure man. It is still my worst nightmare to loose a hard drive.

  • Thanx for the post. This is again a reminder for everyone to think about failure recovery and backups.

  • Wes, if you haven't pitched the drive yet lookup the trick about putting it in the freezer. Its suppose to make the drive work for a little bit, basically enough time to get some data off of it so you can recover a little.

  • Your welcome Victor. I know I'm going to take it even more serious than before. I have already setup a roaming profile and also folder redirections to my network drive. Also I'm storing anything important like my Outlook mail a particular network drive. So now pretty much all my data is on my file server. I just ordered a 200GB drive to go with my 120GB drive and I'm going setup a direct mirror so that both drives contain all my network data.



    Joe: I will lookup that trick and see if I can't get some data off the drive, thanks.

  • You should have used Windows 95 and external drives. Then you wouldn't have to wait for an actual hard drive failure in order to have the same experience as a hard drive. failure.



    Windows 95 taught me to keep 6 backups of every important file and 3 backups of every unimportant file. But in recent years I've become lazy and only keep 3 backups of important files. Someday I'll probably pay for that laziness. If an external hard drive is attached to Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 [*] at the time of booting, Windows displays a lie saying that the hard drive is inconsistent and needs to be checked, and if you don't catch it in time then Windows proceeds to operate on it and really cause corruption (turning its lie into a truth). Destruction of all data isn't as assured under Windows 2000 and 2003 as it was under Windows 95 though, there are too many ways around it. If you let Windows 95 fdisk create the partitions on an external drive then the time bomb is already set and will cause the loss eventually.



    [* Odds are Windows XP too, but I haven't tested it.]

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