PC crash!!!!!!

My FEAKING PC has a hard drive failure 48 hours before my deadline on a wedding I shot. I think, ehhh...no worries....I just got a new macbook pro loaded with ps & cs2! I had been working with ACDSee Pro & ps elements 5....Boy was I in for a shocker!!!! What a difference in the 2 macines & programs. I feel like I am learning how to do everything all over again. Any good tutorial or book suggestions? But I am sooooo happy I got the mac day before the pc crash (must be a sign?)

Hards drive (HD) failures happens all the times. I had 3 HD failerus last year, all brand products, even within 6 months. Thanks to good backups, no loss of data. But restoring all applications / data that's a real hassle and you're losing at least one day.

At the moment I'm using 4 cooled HDs as a RAID 5, which means, that if one drive fails, the system keeps running with the remaining and after exchanging the failed drive, it's recovering again. Only the scratch drive is not mirrored. This is a self built PC, no standard from a shop.
If you have RAID, never 0, as this gives you only speed but no security. 1 / 5 / 10 are for security. If you need security and speed 1 is fine, 5 is slower.
The cooling is good for drives, they last longer as overheating kills them.

Extra to the 5 desktop drives, there is an external backup running every day / after important changes.

If the desktop failes, I'm connecting the external backup drive / keyoboard / display to the laptop and can continue work. Saved me two times.

Lucky for you that you have a backup machine, even if the plattforms are quite different. I hope that your important data was not only on the failed drive.

If the operating system failed alone (Windows, this can happen), your data can be recovered easliy. I would attach it as a second drive to an existing running system and copy all data to the working drive and backup it immediately after that. After that remove the "broken" drive again.
Once I had to recover all files of the computer of a friend due to a crash of the file system, 15000 lost files, reported the scan, but I managed to recover all important data again. Now there are backups available.

Good luck

thanks, very useful!

GertS wrote in post #2966613
Hards drive (HD) failures happens all the times. I had 3 HD failerus last year, all brand products, even within 6 months. Thanks to good backups, no loss of data. But restoring all applications / data that's a real hassle and you're losing at least one day.

Consider this:
http://www.acronis.com …uting/products/​trueimage/

Once I get a new PC (and reformat) or get my PC to a state with all my apps installed, I use this to create a back-up image of my drive.
When I want to do a re-install, I simply go to my back-up drive, find the image, reinstall and whola...everything is where I started. It's the easiest way to rebuild a PC.
For HDD crashes, you can run the app from a CD to install the image.
It's an amazing tool for 50 bucks.
It also has a other back up options for your data as well. I don't keep any files on my PC, only apps and the operating system.

Just replaced my hard drive last week, and continuing to find things I missed...

I had backed up unto CD since I knew it was dying..

Now I need more memory, with a new harddrive, that is basically clean? not sure what that is about..

I am going to check into your program...safer then sorry.

Things I forgot to back up..emails, saved mail and passwords...YUK...

Crypto wrote in post #2968265
For HDD crashes, you can run the app from a CD to install the image.
It's an amazing tool for 50 bucks.
It also has a other back up options for your data as well. I don't keep any files on my PC, only apps and the operating system.

I would be careful with believing the "security" of easy restoring a system. I had an image of the important boot partition of the last broken drive too, restored it to an empty drive and started the computer. Well, windows started, but when the login mask turned up, it moved automatically to shutting down. No input was possible.

May be that the reason was that it was not exactly same size drive, or same partitions found in the old registry, it didn't work.

If you are using an recovery tool, look that you have a CD to boot from, that you can start the recovery tool too. Otherwise, the trick is that you create a minimal start system, attach the disk to which the data should be recovered and restore the data to the drive. After that exchange the drives and boot from the recovered drive.

Good luck to everybody who has to restore a system

Thanks for all the posts. I just got my pc back from a great tech here. It was very inexpensive to reinstall a new harddrive. He also suggested getting an external harddrive as a backup. Reinstalling programs seems to be going fine....Just need to start over on an order, but could be much worse!!!

GertS wrote in post #2969834
I would be careful with believing the "security" of easy restoring a system. I had an image of the important boot partition of the last broken drive too, restored it to an empty drive and started the computer. Well, windows started, but when the login mask turned up, it moved automatically to shutting down. No input was possible.

May be that the reason was that it was not exactly same size drive, or same partitions found in the old registry, it didn't work.

If you are using an recovery tool, look that you have a CD to boot from, that you can start the recovery tool too. Otherwise, the trick is that you create a minimal start system, attach the disk to which the data should be recovered and restore the data to the drive. After that exchange the drives and boot from the recovered drive.

Good luck to everybody who has to restore a system

I'm not sure what tool you use, but one thing I would be sure to do validate the image when you create it and after it's created. Furthermore, You always have the Windows CD to rebuild the system if the image is corrupt.
Using a tool to have a OS backup image is just an easier way to do it without spending hours re-installing windows and apps. I use this method on my PC's about once a year.