Recovering from a computer disaster: Part I
Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7

This is a true story; the names haven’t even been changed to protect the innocent or guilty.

The first thing you need to do is to get the thought out of your mind that something bad won’t happen to your computer. It’s easy when things are going well to forget that computers are subject to all sorts of maladies – just like we humans are.

I’m going to relate two experiences we had in the past week or so that we hope will be as good of lesson for you as it was for us.

First we’ll start with TC’s experience. On a Sunday morning, TC went to his computer to do some work and noticed that the hard drive was making clicking and clattering noises. The hard drive was several years old, and hard drives do fail. More often than not hard drives fail slowly. But if you start noticing that programs take longer to open, many programs give you the “not responding” dialog at first, then start working, and if your boot and shut down times are much longer than normal, a failing hard drive MAY be the cause. There are many other things that could result in the above symptoms, and a hard drive going bad is one of them. The clicking, clattering sounds coming from the computer’s main hard drive coupled with the symptoms described, made it a fairly easy diagnosis: hard drive failure was imminent.

As much as TC preaches in our newsletters about the importance of backing up – full image backups being the best of all possible backups – TC hadn’t been exactly practicing what he’d been preaching. So there he was on a Sunday morning, knowing his hard drive was failing and knowing he’d not created an image backup since November.

While he’d been backing up files using Oops! Backup, he’d not done a mirror image of his primary hard drive for over 5 months. Now faced with a looming computer disaster, it was time to make an image backup – and make it quickly.

We have been recommending a free backup program called Paragon Backup & Recovery. TC still had version 9 installed on his desktop, so the first thing he did was download version 10. After it was downloaded, and installed, the first thing he did is prepare a recovery CD. We’re not talking about the kind of recovery CD that sometimes come with new computers, we’re talking about one that lets you boot your computer and run tasks –like restoring a drive from a backup – or partitioning a hard drive. After he created the recover media, TC began backing up his main hard drive – the primary hard drive – and hoping the backup would complete before the hard drive failed completely.

This is a good time to point out that we probably store more data on our hard drives than the average person would: TC’s had 230 GB of data, programs, etc. to backup – and it takes a while to back that much data up. Since Paragon makes an exact clone of your hard drive, everything on your hard drive is copied – including your Windows installation.

It took nearly 2 hours to “image” TC’s hard drive – all the while he was hoping that the hard drive would keep spinning long enough for Paragon to clone it. Luck was with him that morning, because two hours later, Paragon reported that the disk had been successfully “imaged”. Paragon allows you to double-check the integrity of the backups it makes, so TC took the extra time to verify that that disk image Paragon created was viable. Again luck was with him, everything was backed up; TC had a perfect mirror image of his hard drive, now all he needed to do was buy a new hard drive and clone his old drive onto it.

Installing a new hard drive in computer that has been built within the last five years is really easy to do. With most brands of computers, these days, you don’t even need a screwdriver to open the case. Opening the case is easy, and installing a hard drive is just as easy. The most common hard drives are SATA hard drives, There’s only two cables connecting it to the computer, one is a power cable the only connects the hard drive to the mainboard – or “motherboard”. You simply slip out the old hard drive, and slip in the new one, hook up the two cables and installation is complete – sort of.

This is a good time to point out to those of you who have more than one hard drive, to make sure you know which drive you’re replacing. Paragon makes it simple for you to know that you’re replacing the correct drive. Paragon gives you the serial number of the drive you’re backing up. So if you’re replacing that drive, all you have to do is look for the drive that has that serial number and swap the new drive for the new drive. You don’t even have to know which cables go to which drive – there are only two cables on modern SATA drives – and unlike the older hard drives no jumper settings to mess with. Just make sure you check the serial number of your hard drive that Paragon gives you and swap it out for the new one. It won’t take you more than five minutes to install a new hard drive, it’s that simple.

Anyway, getting back to TC’s story; after he had created the recovery media and created a mirror-image of his hard drive, using Paragon, TC removed the clattering old hard drive from his computer, and replaced it with a brand new one.

Since we’re assuming most of you have never attempted replacing your primary hard drive, we want to point out two things:

1. You don’t need the disk that comes with your hard drive;
2. You don’t have anything on your new hard drive so you can’t boot your computer from it.

Most new hard drives come with a CD that allows you to boot your computer and format the new hard drive so it can be used. However TC wanted to use his image backup of his old hard drive and restore it to his new hard drive. He booted up by inserting the recovery media he had created using Paragon and began the process of restoring the image from an old hard drive on a new one.

Continue reading "Recovering from a computer disaster" - Part II is here