My OperaOff-topic: I'm a disk crash survivor
Tuesday, September 5, 2006 8:00:00 PM
I've recently had a rough week, PC-wise. My laptop's disk had a crash, made Windows unbootable and I had to go through a lot of effort to get my data back and my laptop up and running again. These are some of the tools I used:
The number of websites I read is too long to list and too long to remember.
With the help of these tools (and others), I mananged to make my old disk readable, made images of the partitions, reinstalled Windows XP on a new disk, then restored the images to the new disk. It's easy when you know how, but it takes a very long time.
Learning the hard way can be the best learning, but it's still very expensive learning... I'm now a convert to "rescue by Ghost", and will from now on feel much better protected than previously against future disk crashes following a much improved routine that both takes backups of individual files and images of disk partitions.
- scandisk
- chkdisk
- fdisk
- Ultimate Boot CD for Windows running BartPE
- A Windows XP Professional installation CD
- Symantec Ghost 2003
- PowerQuest Partition Magic 8.0
- mbrfix and mbrwizard
- DriveCloneXP
- fixmbr and fixboot from XPs recovery console
- IBM ThinkVantage Rescue and Recovery
The number of websites I read is too long to list and too long to remember.
With the help of these tools (and others), I mananged to make my old disk readable, made images of the partitions, reinstalled Windows XP on a new disk, then restored the images to the new disk. It's easy when you know how, but it takes a very long time.
Learning the hard way can be the best learning, but it's still very expensive learning... I'm now a convert to "rescue by Ghost", and will from now on feel much better protected than previously against future disk crashes following a much improved routine that both takes backups of individual files and images of disk partitions.
