Hard Drive Failure

My primary HD on my Windows box finally died. We had a power outage when I was at work, and when I came back the machine would consistently boot into BSOD claiming that “boot drive is not mountable”. The drive was acting funky anyway, so this is not a huge surprise.

So the machine I use at home the most is temporarily out of commission till I reinstall windows on the new drive. In other words, I’m windowless for today, and probably tomorrow until I get everything back in order. Fortunately I still have my laptop so it’s not the end of the world.

I booted Knoppix on the machine and I can still access the drive so I should be able to restore everything as needed. I was also pretty good with backups – but of course, the power outage happened on a backup day so I have no clue if it finished. I do have a 60 GB file on the external drive which was last modified at 3pm today, but it might as well be corrupted. The earlier backups are from April and May which is not so great.

But, again – since I’m able to access the drive from Knoppix I should have no problems pulling the data off of it later on. Most of my important stuff was on the secondary drive anyway. So I’m not panicking just yet. At most I will loose my Firefox preferences folder, and some saved games, and whatever crap I had thrown onto the the desktop.

So my plan for today is:

1. Pull the band HD
2. Install Windows
3. Go through the usual post-installation tasks such as hunting down drivers, installing applications and etc
4. Check if the latest backup was ok, and try to restore the most crucial files.
5. ???
6. Profit

Whatever I planned to blog about today and tomorrow is going to get pushed back, because this crap will likely take me a while.

[tags]hard drive, hard drive failure, bad hard drive, bsod, windows[/tags]