Hard Drive Failure

garybear · October 16, 2009

Can you recover from a Hard Drive failure with your back up program?? What I'm asking is can you restore your PC just like it is right now if your HD dies. Do you have a way to boot up and recover your OS if you get the BSOD or if you get some really bad boys on your PC (Viruses,Malware,ect)? If your answer is yes, then good for you my friend. If you don't know for sure or your answer is no, my advice is you better do some thing right now. My friend itsmejjj has asked these same questions before, but I'm asking them again, because it is the most important thing you can have. I'm sure I can recover from all the above in less than 30 minutes andI want all my friends to have the same confidence that I have. Questions and comments are always welcome on my threads. Live well my friends, {garybear

Maxxwire · October 16, 2009

http://i468.photobucket.com/albums/rr44/Maxxwire_Photos/Album%202/macrium.jpg

I used to be the bug without a reliable Disc backup system in danger of hitting the windshield at any time, but just 18 days before disaster struck I became the windshield thanks to garybear's sound advice and Macruim Reflect Disc Imaging Backup and the disaster of having to spend up to 100 hours manually restoring all of my programs, data and settings was avoided with a simple 30 minute Reflect re-Imaging of my main C Drive. Fortunately I did not wait until it was too late......

Justin D. Nickoftime

garybear · October 17, 2009

I'm done.

I will not bring this subject up again. I'm so happy everyone on this forum answered yes to my question. I have to assume they did as only one member had a comment to my thread. Let me know when your Hard Drive dies and you are dead in the water; I will donate 5$ to your repair man. Before I joined this forum and started listening to those in the know, I donated a couple hundred to my repair man. If you think you will never see the BSOD, I have some bridges I need to sell. I would ask you to please not cry on this forum when your PC goes belly up and you can't recover your OS, I don't want to hear it. Go cry some where else. You have had plenty of warnings and plenty of suggestions how not to let that happen. I hope I sounded hateful, because that was my intention. There is an excuse for not knowing but no excuse for being intentionally stupid. I'm stupid but its not intentional.

Maxxwire · October 17, 2009

garybear- Due to the fact that that I have experienced the BSOD and have had System Restore fail on me 4 times in a row and as a result have had to do 2 excruciatingly lengthy manual Restorations I was more than ready to take your advise and installed the simple and easy to use Macrium Reflect Image Backup Software. The 10 minutes that it took to make a compressed Image of all the programs, security system and files on my main hard drive right down to the smallest user selectable setting and safely save it to an attached drive saved me a week's worth of work wracking my brain trying to restore the drive to its exact former level of functionality from my own memory.

In that I have learned that it is best to backup my backups I have been emboldened to do a backup to a 16 GB Flash Drive which hopefully will include Windows PE as well as the 11.6 GB compressed Image from Macrium Reflect.

http://i468.photobucket.com/albums/rr44/Maxxwire_Photos/Album%202/adata_xpg.png

Two A-Data XPG Xupreme 200X 16 GB Flash Drives featuring high speed Dual Channel Technology which are professionally benchmarked at over 240 Mbps read performance are in transit as I type this to help facilitate this Flash Drive Win PE/Reflect Image Backup project and the next time my computer needs to be Recovered when I whip out my little high speed 16 GB Flash Drive and do the entire Image Recovery from it in just 30 minutes or less I will be thinking of you my friend with an ear to ear grin!

~Maxx~

Maxxwire · October 17, 2009

garybear- I knew about and had downloaded the Macrium Reflect upgrade to v4.2.2082, but I just found out while doing research about using USB Flash Drives in the PE that the Windows PE software has also been updated to v2.1.200 which is now 130.854 MB (up from 107 MB) to reflect the changes that Macrium has made in their software so that the latest upgrades may be accessed in the Preinstall Environment. And as a result I just got done burning an updated Rescue CD and as I understand it the boot menu option to start the Reflect Recovery Environment has also been similarly upgraded. You probably already knew about this, but it was great news for me!

~Maxx~

garybear · October 18, 2009

hi guys. whats up???http://i925.photobucket.com/albums/ad93/gandorwig/MSN-Emoticon-applause-004.gif http://i925.photobucket.com/albums/ad93/gandorwig/zzz1003.gif

zzz1003.zip

Maxxwire · October 18, 2009

garybear- After finding out the many screenfulls of procedures that have to be executed in order to place Windows PE on a USB Flash Drive it gave me a whole new appreciation for what Macruim Reflect goes through to place Windows PE on both CD/DVD as well as in the Boot Menu Option. So I finally decided to go ahead and place just the ISO image on one of my NTSF reformatted Toshiba 16 GB USB Flash Drives which did fairly well reaching transfer speeds as high as 244 Mbps (30.5 MBps) and yet overall it still took a little longer to place the Backup Image on the USB Flash Drive, but at least now I have added a portable backup option for my notebook computer...

http://i468.photobucket.com/albums/rr44/Maxxwire_Photos/Album%202/USBBackup_22-562009-10-17.png

~Maxx~

sunny staines · October 18, 2009

gary

if your hard drive is kaput through wear and rear or just old age[5 years plus] then there is not too much.

run chkdsk in case its just a few bad sectors.

i have read that putting the hdd in deep freeze overnight then running asap after taking out of the fridge may give you just enough time to recover some info[not tried myself].

normally when a hdd goes you get early warning signs like grumbling noise when it runs, so you have ample time to replace it.

but you being the king of all backup's should have no worries

[how often do you back up]

Maxxwire · October 18, 2009

normally when a hdd goes you get early warning signs like grumbling noise when it runs, so you have ample time to replace it.

but you being the king of all backup's should have no worries

[how often do you back up]

garybear is the king of the backup's isn't he? Thanks to Gary I now have 5 Image backups with varying security system configurations ready to restore should my computer's hard drive fail or Windows System Restore fails 4 times in a row like it has in the past.

~Maxx~

sunny staines · October 18, 2009

maxxwire

when i get my w7, i might hold off intalling till the boot up disc is sorted with bart pe.

but would like to keep the follow image backups.

1] just windows & office with all updates.

2] another after all programs installed and updated.

3&4] then weekly ones always keeping previous weeks too.

got this from a reader called burrwalnut in another forum

"1. If you don’t have the Windows 7 DVD, you can make a repair CD by going to Control Panel > All Control Panel Items > Backup and Restore > Create a system repair disc (in the left pane) > pick your optical drive (if more than one) and click Create disc.

2. To create an image of a drive, go to Control Panel > All Control Panel Items > Backup and Restore > Create a system image (in the left pane) > Choose hard disk or optical drive then start the backup.

3. To recover a hard disk image, boot from the Windows 7 DVD (or the previously made repair CD in 1 above), choose ‘Press any key to boot from CD/DVD’ and Windows will start to load the files. Select your language, time, currency and keyboard then click ‘Repair’ in the bottom left corner, now choose System Image Recovery and follow the prompts. It’s quite a quick process"

Maxxwire · October 19, 2009

sunny staines- Is this procedure for all versions of Win 7 or just for Ultimate and Business only?

~Maxx~

sunny staines · October 19, 2009

maxxwire

not sure not got my W7 yet

Maxxwire · October 19, 2009

sunny staines- I was just curious because only the Ultimate and Business versions of Vista have those features, but Macrium Reflect works great for Vista Home and Home Premium in fact the Image Recovery is one of the primary features that distinguishes the Vista Ultimate edition. I look forward to hearing about the Win 7 features once you get it. Is Win 7 being released on October 22 in your part of the world also?

~Maxx~

sunny staines · October 19, 2009

same here in G.B. a lot of people got them this week early as the postal workers are going on strike this thursday, they could have at least waited till everyone got their W7.

Maxxwire · October 19, 2009

The postal workers going on strike the exact same day as the release of Win 7 sounds like quite a coincidence or do you suppose that it is part of an elaborate Macintosh conspiracy? :shock:

~Maxx~

sunny staines · October 19, 2009

maxxwire

our postal workers are mostly a lazy lot, the management are trying to kick them into touch, but the left wing unions are stirring it all up.

its the general public that suffer.

garybear · October 20, 2009

Macrium users

Hi. This is a FYI f or all you macrium users. http://support.macrium.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=398 I just made an image and got one of these. Seems that it isn't a problem. That's the way I read the thread. {garybear}

Maxxwire · October 23, 2009

Gary- Thanks for the heads up! Its nice to know that Macrium Reflect has a built in backup system for making Snapshots...

"Originally, Macrium Reflect only shipped with pssnap.sys. Similarly, other leading disk imaging vendors used their own drivers (and still do) not VSS. When we made Macrium Reflect compatible with Server 2003 we used VSS because MS Exchange and SQL Server are server applications. However, VSS is included in all Windows versions from XP onwards so we standardized on VSS as the method for creating volume snapshots. However, VSS can be unreliable at starting (as you have found out) so Macrium Reflect 'falls back' to pssnap.sys and completes the Image on XP and Vista."

~Maxx~

itsmejjj · October 23, 2009

Gary can you please tell us , as soon as thy get a compatible working build fer 7

and let us know? if you cab keep this in mind?

thanks --

Maxxwire · October 23, 2009

jjj- This is from the Macrium Reflect website...

Current Version information

Version: v4.2.2082

Date: 3rd October 2009

File Size: 28.1 MB

File Name: reflect_setup_free_x86_x64.exe

MD5 Hash: 3b0c637fb68dedc08f60cfb89bd99035

Windows Versions: Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7. 32 and native 64 Bit.

Also- Update for Windows 7 boot menu

Full edition only: The Windows PE 2.0 boot menu has been updated to work with Windows 7.

(I also had to get the full edition because Micro$oft charges for each Vista PE or Win 7 PE download, but the fee also includes free downloads of upgrades to the Preinstall Environment.)

Here is the complete changelog with all of the details-

http://www.macrium.com/download/details4.2.2082.htm

~Maxx~

Hard Drive Failure

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