About a year ago I got a Dell Vostro 1400 Laptop. The system came pre-installed with Vista Home Premium 32 Bit. First mistake was that I kept all my documents, music, and (most importantly) family pictures all on the same partition.
One of the really nice features was the card reader that came on the machine. That was great cause my wife and I finally had a really convenient way to take digital pictures of our 1 year old (only child) and transfer them from our camera to our computer. Oh this is great and convenient but don't keep all your eggs in one basket. After several months of use the computer started acting up. Started getting sloppy and unreliable. I was determined to fix the computer. I got too focused on that and didn't take whatever means needed to back up the system (I should have had a full image from the start). Eventually the system got to the point where I couldn't even get it too boot properly.
1. I eventually found out this was a system file corruption issue. The corruption caused some very erratic and eventually crippling performance. The only way I was able to boot the OS was through Safe Mode. I couldn't with the knowlege I had then fix the install. Eventually I ran SpinRite from a diagnosic CD and that seemed to repair everything! I thought I was clear but wanted to make sure to clean up the system and prepare it for a full image backup (ShadowProtect Desktop, after reading a PC Mag top 23 utility review, was what I had in mind).
In November we had a water pipe burst in our house and had to live in a hotel for a month while I house was repaired and during that time I decided to try and compact the files on my partition to prepar it for a back-up solution. During the cleaning up I discovered my MFT was horribly fragmented (because of a near full HDD, VSS, both, or otherwise I'm not sure). I used Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8.5 Special Edition (in hind site it might not have Vista ready which mattered here) to defrag the MFT and our son turned off the computer during the process. This was working on the normally protected OS files so I have no idea what damage this did. There was a message on the screen (I didn't see it but I assume a warning or error) and the computer hasn't booted since.
The POST will complete but then only a blinking cursor and black screen after that. There is nothing displayed after the post. There are NO error messages, no evidence of any OS even attempting to boot. I can still get the pre-installed Diagnostic partition to boot and check hardware and the
other partitions are still fully accessable if the drive is connected to another OS or machine. I am also able to run several Linux live CD's and navigate all but my OS partition. So hardware isn't my concern.
2. If I run Windows PE my OS is not recognized or listed so I can't run a repair on it. If I connect the HDD to another computer the partition is displayed as RAW and my only option is to format. If I call Dell they tell me that I have to re-install the OS and wipe everything in the process. Like I said before, we had put a whole bunch of family photos that might not exist anywhere else of our first child. No matter what approach I take I can't get the partition to be recognized as a NTFS. I've scanned it with some data recovery software and it indicates that I can somehow get this back but as of now I'm still sitting with a dead computer. I guess that poses a question: Can ShadowProtect create an image of the system I am describing in the state it is in? If so then if I get a copy then I make an image work on that image safely then go from there. I'd really appreciate a definitive answer regarding this if ANYONE can provide it. Thanks.
3. Which means I'm in the doghouse. I've learned a lot about what you aren't suppose to do and what you should do in advance. That doesn't help with the particular HDD right now though. I still want to get the files back and ideally get the OS up and running again without HAVING to go through a re-install. The computer has been completely dead (aside from using Linux Live CD's) since November.
I realize I could re-install and start over....but I will loose those pics and programs (which isn't nearly as important and are replacible) in the process. The "best" part about all of this...my father gave us a NAS for Christmas the following month...
If I had had that all along I could have easily kept all my pictures on it and it provides plenty of storage and built in redundancy. That's what I get for trying to save money (which I didn't really have a choice about). Originally I needed storage to put the images on...which were later given to me by my father as well (turned out he had some extra HDDs...GREAT!!..if only I had known that). I didn't bother with trying the demo of ShadowProtect or any of the competitors because I couldn't afford to buy the full software (newly married, new house, new kid, supper expensive daycare....the usual parenting stuff we didn't know anything about
)
Bottom line: Have a good backup plan in place. ESPECIALLY if you are newly married with your first child. We still don't have any disk imaging going but we do have the NAS and as long as we have everything mapped there or we are setting up Synchs then all the pictures are fine.
The NAS is the only way to go. Especially if you tend to take computers apart, mix and match parts, and mess around with them in general like I do. There is never a consistant set of computers working my house...but we can store everything in one place with the piece of mind that when a HDD dies everything is still there. We just have to add a good HDD back in and the NAS mirrors everything back without any involvement on my part. That way no matter what computer you put on your network it can get to the same files. This also works as a great way to back up DVD's with the advantage of being able to watch them from any computer in the house...and if you have it set up right you can stream them to your media extender.
03-17-2009, 07:00 PM
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