PSA: Dead computer is going to slow us down a bit

[jducoeur]

Birka was rather pleasant: good enough to make me forget that right *before* Birka (like, as we were on our way out the door), our desktop computer went *boom*. Windows insisted on updating; msmemory allowed it to do so; and when it finished rebooting, it came back with an error to the effect of "/windows/system/stuff corrupted; please run PC recovery". (Have I ever mentioned how much I hate Windows? Take it as read.)

So we are a bit hosed at the moment. We both have our laptops, but a lot of day-to-day stuff -- in particular, our websites and our main email -- mostly get run through the desktop machine, so things are going to run slowly or be delayed until I've rebuilt that. I believe that PC recovery will, in fact, get the machine working again, but at the cost of deleting all our programs and forcing us to reinstall everything from scratch, which is likely to take all week. (We run a lot on that machine, and it's already a busy week.)

So step one is figuring out how to back up the hard drive. (Since I do not necessarily trust PC Recovery not to lose *any* of the data.) My guess is that I need to get some kind of disk enclosure that will let me hook the drive up to one of the laptops, and back it up to a portable drive. Bleah -- comes a little too close to having to deal with hardware for my tastes. If anyone can point me at exactly what I need to buy from Microcenter, it would be appreciated...

Comments

[bkdelong.livejournal.com]

That depends. Can you open up the machine and look at what kind of drive it is? SATA or IDE? Do either of your laptops have Firewire capabilities? Might be faster than getting a USB enclosure.

Here's the Microcenter search I did:
http://tinyurl.com/c89zky

[jducoeur]

Hmm. Good question. My bet is IDE, but I haven't actually checked. Don't think either laptop has Firewire, though...

[bkdelong.livejournal.com]

Bring the drive with you, they can tell you which to buy. Double-check the laptops have USB 2 and not just USB 1 and that'll be the way to do it.

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Easy to tell: if it has a wide ribbon cable, it's IDE; if it's narrow, it's SATA.

[jtdiii.livejournal.com]

Easiest way to do this is to pull the drive and take it with you

[jducoeur]

Well, the thing is that I'm not necessarily planning on changing machines. I believe that all that's happened here is that Windows has fouled up and corrupted the OS image, so reinstalling the OS on the same hardware is likely to be the cheapest option for getting back up and running. So I want to simply back up the drive, and then run PC Recovery on it. (It's possible that the disk itself is actually bad, but the symptoms don't necessarily indicate that -- I'm entirely willing to believe that it's software error this time.)

If I decide to buy a new desktop, then I'd certainly just pull the drive and install it as a new data drive -- that's what I usually do. But that's a moderate amount of time and hassle, and it's increasingly hard to get desktops with XP installed. (Neither of us has much desire to get Vista.) So my initial preference is to simply pull the existing drive, hook it (somehow) to one of the laptops, back it up, and then reinstall it and let PC Recovery do its thing. The question is mostly that "somehow", which is something I haven't done before.

Note that the recovery image is *on* the hard drive, in a separate partition -- AFAIK, I don't have a separate recovery CD. (Yes, I know -- bad me for not building one.) So if I want to keep this machine running with the existing OS, the easiest way to do so is with this hard drive as the boot drive...

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

"it's increasingly hard to get desktops with XP installed"

I'd just like to give a shoutout to PCsForEveryone.com. I've bought all my desktops from them for about a decade now, and they have great prices and service. Plus, they still assume their customers will prefer Windows XP, and that is the default option.

[jducoeur]

Yaas, I remember them well. And as I was reminded earlier this evening, Microcenter also sells a variety of XP options. So if we do decide to move to a new machine, there are alternatives. But first I'm going to explore the cheaper option of getting this one up and running again...

[laurion]

Best bet, if you just need to hook it up long enough to get data off, is to get a sata/ide to USB adapter, something like http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812119152 . That will let you hook the drive to another computer short term.

Even if you opt to try to do disk recovery rather than let PC Recovery take a virtual swing with the hammer, you should back up the data first. Much better to have it backed up just in case.

What is your current backup process?

[jducoeur]

Hmm -- yes, that's more or less what I was thinking. Good to see it: I was simply assuming that such a thing must exist.

Even if you opt to try to do disk recovery rather than let PC Recovery take a virtual swing with the hammer, you should back up the data first. Much better to have it backed up just in case.

Oh, absolutely. I want to be careful here.

What is your current backup process?

Retrospect running on a One-Touch. Problem is, I have a nasty feeling that the backup process has broken down again -- it's never been as reliable as I'd like, and from what I've seen, I'm guessing that it hasn't run in at least several weeks. It had been on my list to investigate when this happened.

So while I'm confident that *most* of our data is safe, I suspect that at least the last several weeks of email are at-risk -- hence the caution...

[ckd]

Boot the desktop from a Knoppix live CD or something, then copy the files to an external drive?

[jducoeur]

Hmm. An interesting option that hadn't occurred to me -- thanks, and I'll think about it. But it's probably easier to me to just rip out the drive and back it up via one of the laptops...