Arrrghhh! Not again :(

[headkaze]

Some of you may know that I had a recent virus attack which prompted me to do a full re-install of my dev machine. I just recently got everything set up again including my dev environment so to get back into the groove of things I did an update to the Theme Editor.

Today I was downloading the Desert Combat mod for BF 1942 because me and some mates are planning to do a LAN session next weekend. Download went fine but when I went to copy it to one of my network drives I got the dreaded "cyclic redundancy error" message. The file wouldn't move.

So I think ok, I'll do a chkdsk /R and fix any bad sectors on the drive, since I had never had any problems with it before and thought it must be a few sectors this 500 odd meg file occupied.

Windows reboots and does the chkdsk, okay a few files have allocation errors and what not. It finishes and the login screen pops up. I log in under my usual account except this time it's like all my personal settings have been deleted and it's logging in like it's a freshly created account. Oh no!

But it gets worse, the machine crashes before it logs back in. I reboot - this time it won't go back into windows even in safe mode!

I decide to try a restore, so I boot up my XP CD and there is no option to repair! I try recovery console to rebuild the boot.ini but still no repair option. By now I'm thinking ok, it's time to get rid of the HDD and put in a new one and start from scratch once again. Painful, but no other option seems possible.

But the issue lies with the recent Theme Editor update which was a number of hours of work. After messing around with some floppy disks I manage to get a DOS program called ReadNTFS to copy the updated source files onto a 3 1/4 floppy drive. So at least I saved the source for that. I won't mention the other stuff I've lost since it's not really relevent to GameEx, and this post is OT enough.

So close call, but all is okay in the end. Just dreading the big re-install.

Quick message to Tom: I'll be sending over the latest source for the Theme Editor soon!

[Smiff]

I was gonna say, bad harddrive. bad luck.

i've been buying all seagate drives recently and touch wood not had one fail yet. but ya never knew. thanks for the reminder to sort some backup out. at least i'd only lose some game saves and configs

[headkaze]

I've never had a problem with WD drives.. until now. All my drives are WD. I've heard a few people have HDD failures using seagate drives, but now I guess I've proven it can happen to both brands.

[Tom Speirs]

Headkaze, that is scary, but it has happened to me before, I think I used that tool too. There is also a good s/w disaster recovery package I used before by Ontrack, that made the whole processs a lot easier, with good results.

And yes, please send me the source code, I tend to do a lot of backups. I have a 1.5TB array on a server in brand new hard disks just for backups.

Thanks,

Tom

[shbon]

Headkaze

Have you considered using something like Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost for saving partition images. Once you've reinstalled your XP and programs and set it up sweetly, take a complete image of the HDD's partitions. (I have C: = OS, D: installed programs, E:F:G: Data etc...). Then you can refresh C:/D: from the partition image instead of reinstalling everything from scratch. Only takes about 10 mins per partition to back up.

I have a couple of spare hard drives and quite frequently copy all the program partitions from my main drive to another HDD or onto DVD. So, I always have a full image backup of the OS and installed programs to slot in immediately if the main drive or XP pops!

Regards

Shaun

[Tom Speirs]

I think something that people tend to forget is that hard disks only last like a maximum of five years before failing. New disks are better, but they don't last long. I've got through loads of disks since 1999.

Also, wanted to say, I dont image my drives, as installing an OS is pretty easy for me. I tend to use a batch file that copies only changed files to my server every day. Its fairly cost effective now just to build a PC stick 3 500Gb's drives in and just use dynamic drives in Windows to make them into 1.5TB. Dont even need a server version of windows.

[headkaze]

Yeah, I used to use Ghost alot when I was working for the IT dept in a Hospital over here in Perth. Actually it was a DOS version of Ghost and we were one of the first places to experiment with Ghosting for mass installations over here. I also used it extensively when I was working for an IT company too.

But yeah, I havn't used Ghost for a long time, and I'm with Tom in that it dosn't take me too long to install everything again. I've just installed my sisters new laptop yesterday and another PC two days ago for a friend. My dev machine does take a big longer than usual though, so Ghosting it would be cool I guess, just prefer to keep the HDD space for other things.

Luckily I have a backup of most of C: from the last virus attack, so all my documents and shit loads of code I've written is all safe on another drive.

The C: on my dev machine was making a funny noise when I was reinstalling it before so it should have been enough of a warning for me to replace it. Oh well we live and learn eh.

[emphatic]

Yeah, I used to use Ghost alot when I was working for the IT dept in a Hospital over here in Perth. Actually it was a DOS version of Ghost and we were one of the first places to experiment with Ghosting for mass installations over here. I also used it extensively when I was working for an IT company too.

But yeah, I havn't used Ghost for a long time, and I'm with Tom in that it dosn't take me too long to install everything again. I've just installed my sisters new laptop yesterday and another PC two days ago for a friend. My dev machine does take a big longer than usual though, so Ghosting it would be cool I guess, just prefer to keep the HDD space for other things.

Luckily I have a backup of most of C: from the last virus attack, so all my documents and shit loads of code I've written is all safe on another drive.

The C: on my dev machine was making a funny noise when I was reinstalling it before so it should have been enough of a warning for me to replace it. Oh well we live and learn eh.

I use Ghost a lot. If I remember correctly, you get one "ghosting" for free if you wanna try it after doing a fresh install. I just don't like installing Windows, downloading drivers, setting up my network etc. It's so much easier just to revert to a ghost image. And I also use a batch-file that backs up everything on my current desktop, my fonts, my icons, my favourites and my Firefox Profile (all settings, addons and favourites).

After reverting to a ghost, I simply run another batch that restores all my "essentials". Then I run Windows Update, and finally, create a new ghost image. Then I burn that onto a DVD-RW. No space wasted, lots of time saved.

Sorry about your problems, Headkaze.

Emph

[hansolo77]

Heh, i've just recently started using Ghost. It's a great tool when you're troubleshooting. When I was bulding my MCE machine, I had it working perfectly. Then something made it crash and I had to reinstall everything. Bad luck there. I spent almost a month trying to make it work again. Thats what I get for building my own instead of buying a premade system. But in the end this second time, once I got it working right, I made a ghost image and saved it to a dvd-r. So now if it crashes again, I can at least restore back to the square one settings with a fully Windows Updated system that's ready to work with. I'm planning on doing another Ghost here soon of all my games/roms and such. Just incase...

You'll wish you did when it happens...

[Ricci]

Seagate=crap!! I have 1000 plus computers at work on my network, and the Seagates fail like crazy!! Ghost is a good product, but a tape deck beats it anyday!! Personally, for home, I just use my external 300gig drive and backup my main computer once a month. One of my drives just failed, so I popped another in, and within 20 minutes, transferred everything over and was up and running again...Personally, I like Maxtor the best-at least they have some (limited) support. WD and Seagate give us quite a bit of grief if we have drives that fail at work and try to return them. Maxtor just says send it back and we get a replacement (even when the warranty is often lapsed!)

[Smiff]

Seagate has now been bought by Maxtor. not sure what this means to the products, presumably soon all Maxtor drives will have the same internals as Seagates?