Hard Drive Crash - Pictures Disaster Avoided!

A few weeks ago, not long after getting home from our winter vacation in Palm Springs and Arizona, I came very close to losing all of the over 1,000 originals of the pics I had taken during our 3 1/2 months away - what a disaster that would have been! Luckily, and I do mean luckily, I was able to recover the pics from the damaged drive and to then complete the backup of them I was planning on doing but hadn't quite gotten around to!

One of the things we really enjoy about going on an RV trip is the opportunity to take lots and lots of pictures - especially of places we've never been to before and, who knows, might not ever get a chance to return to. Posting the pics on our online tripjournal also allows our family and friends back home to enjoy some of the sights we are seeing and to follow along with us. I'm sure they all really enjoy seeing us swimming in a beautiful outdoor pool in the middle of February while they are just freezing back home! Oh well!

How did this disaster almost happen? It was fast and completely unexpected as most disasters are. First, the originals pics were all on the laptop we take with us. After getting home, I decided to transfer the images from the laptop to my desktop PC in order to free up space. I then intended to burn all of the pics to a dvd disk as backup. My first mistake was not leaving all the images on the laptop until I had made backups. My second mistake was not burning the dvd backup right after moving the pics to my desktop PC - I thought it would be o.k. to wait a couple of days. Big mistake!

The next day my hard drive crashed and I was not able to access anything on my PC - I couldn't even load XP in safe mode. When I booted from a floppy, I couldn't access my HD at all. I was pretty sure my entire drive and all of its contents were toast. I tried a few utilities - all to no avail. Then, I stumbled across a free utility program called the Ultimate Boot CD - it is unbelievable!!

I now have a new hard drive installed, my XP OS(with all drivers) and all of my files intact just as if the drive had never crashed. Here's how it worked:

1. I bought and installed a new 250GB SATA HD(didn't even format or partition it - cost $90.)
2. Booted from the Ultimate Boot CD and elected to do a complete copy of the partition from Disk 0 to Disk 1(my new hard drive).
3. It took 14 hours to run - an extremely long and nerve-wracking time, but it copied every bit(exclusive of damaged sectors) from my old HD to the new one. It setup a working partition of 150GB's - the same as my original. The other 100GB's was allocated to a second partition.
4. When the copy finished, I booted from my new HD and my Windows XP screen came up just as good as new with all of my programs, files, drivers etc etc. - Hallelujah!

I have been using my desktop for 2 weeks now and I haven't encountered a single problem. Whatever was damaged on my original HD seems not to have been a critical component. I ran the Windows file checker and it reported that I had no critical Windows files missing or damaged. So, I dodged a bullet, not to mention all of the ridicule I would rightly have received for not practicing my own advice to everyone to 'always make backups of data' yada, yada, yada! Having spent my entire career in I.T., I knew better but still didn't think it would happen to me!

So, if anyone out there has a hard drive problem of any kind, I would strongly recommend downloading this program - the Ultimate Boot CD. It also has over 100 diagnostic utilities for partitioning HD's, checking them and a whole bunch of other really neat things. It is one of the best utilities I have ever used and it saved me a whole bunch of misery!

And, yes, I immediately backed up all my images right after recovering the drive and will continue to do so in the future - just as I advise everyone else to do!