Hard drive crash ... backup is five days old :(

Top Geek

Top Geek

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Suddenly, constant hard drive activity for 2-3 minutes, then a slew of random and obscure error messages about missing files and such. I had no choice but to do a hard power-off.

Upon booting up, Windows, of course, prompts me to start in safe mode, which hangs and fails. Reboot and I get the error message:

2100:Detection Error on HDD0 (Main HDD)

The drive still powers on and spins up. Attached it with a USB SATA adapter, won't mount on Windows, Linux or GParted. The only thing I've found in my arsenal that might work is TBU IFL (disk imaging software), which seems to be able to see the partitions, open the partitions, and see that they contain data. I'm currently imaging it to another disk and crossing fingers, toes and every hair on my body.

But, I'm looking for contingency in case this fails. What is recommended for data recovery of this scale? What software should I be looking for?
 
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Which I am, but I'm working on the computer all day. 5 days is a fair amount of data.
 
For the future invest in a mirrored drive set-up.
 
Top Geek said:
Which I am, but I'm working on the computer all day. 5 days is a fair amount of data.
Click to expand...

Gives you a lovely opportunity to rethink and refactor :p

Seriously though, re-creating five days of work may be annoying but it's not the end of the world. You should not need anywhere near five days for that. On the other hand you're spending time on getting those five days' worth back, that may not be a winning strategy.
 
Step 1 back up daily on to separate media
Step 2 introduce logging - put on separate disc
step 3 Test recovery if OK then run
Step 4 = smiley face NB Only works for data bases in my experience Also do not use logical drives which are partitions of the same physical device.
 
How did the imaging go? I've saved varying amounts of data on 'dead' disks using Acronis True Image before, but that's assuming it can be mounted and at least one of those died completely in the process.

I'll admit I'm not completely happy with my backup solution at the moment. A backup of my OS SSD every week and a mirrored pair of drives for data might offer some resilience but I'm well aware that it's not bulletproof.
 
This is why you RAID 1 for important things :)
 
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