Official Luthiers Forum!

To regularly back up those hard drives...

I came back from Christmas dinner at my brothers to a black screen and the message saying "Operating System Not Found". After a couple of tests (I keep some bootable live CDs around) I was able to determine that my hard drive had crashed. It was a physical failure of the equipment...all my files lost...hours of rebuilding my system.

I didn't have a recent backup of my drive, so everything is gone...and I know better.

So, no matter what type of computer you have, remember to back up thos hard drives!

_________________
Joe Breault
Merrimack, NH
Perpetual novice

Those files might not be lost. Here's a Link to a beginners guide to hard disk recovery. Good luck.

AAAh Man, so sorry to hear that Joe, i hope you can recover your files with Paul's link, let us know how it goes for you please.

Serge

Hey Paul,
Thanks for the link to Great site. hope I never crash but now I know where to go first! I assume site has other great info.
BTW-what method(s) do you all use for bacing up-CD data disks?bob J39081.3753356481

Well, I hope that site is useful to you guys. I lost a HD with all my daughters baby pics. First thing to do was do nothing except to read up on data recovery. I found that site and everything turned out ok, got the pics back. I didn't tell my wife until it was a done deal

I guess the first rule is "don't panic", and don't write anything to the HD until after you've recovered your important data.

Unfortunately my HDD physically crashed, it isn't readable at all (not a software issue or a formatting issue). I have to wait till Tuesday to see if the computer hardware guru can get into it at all. Hopefully the old freezer trick will work...we'll see.

_________________
Joe Breault
Merrimack, NH
Perpetual novice

What's the old freezer trick?

[QUOTE=bob J]
BTW-what method(s) do you all use for bacing up-CD data disks?[/QUOTE]

Bob

I've got an external USB hard drive.

I set up a scheduled backup so that it automatically backs up my important data once a week.

Another way to do it would be to add another hard drive to your computer and back up on to that.

I think it's critical to automate this because the one time you forget to do your backup is probably the time you'll get a hardware failure.

If anyone's interested and not sure how to do any of this automated backup stuff I would mind whipping up a step by step pictorial tutorial.

Cheers

Bob

_________________

------------------------------------------------------
Bob Connor
Geelong, Australia

Joe,

I thought my hard drive had physically crashed too.
I got a replacement from Dell (another rebuilt one ) and installed the two of them.
My IT guy from work leant me software called "GetDataBack for NTFS", and I was able to recover virtually all my picture files and Excel/Word files. It was only OS stuff that was bad for the most part. A lot of people, including the manufacturer will tell you that everything is lost, but that's not necessarily the case.... As others have said, don't panic yet.

_________________
"I want to know what kind of pickups Vince Gill uses in his Tele, because if I had those, as good of a player as I am, I'm sure I could make it sound like that.
Only badly."