Following on from my article about backing up your data, I’ve learned some important new lessons:

Hard-drives can fail in many ways and each failure has varying symptoms. Sometimes the thing just fails to work at all. This can be accompanied, perhaps, by some noise from the drive itself. These symptoms are commonly caused by mechanical failure such as a spindle collapse due to a faulty bearing, but this type of fault isn’t the most common. Normally the decline is subtle, increases over time, and is most likely due to a fault with the drive’s onboard electronic circuitry.

I had one such fault with the C: drive in the computer that I’m writing this on recently. Beginning just after writing the article on backups, here’s an account of the subtle chain of events leading up to changing the drive:

For whatever reason I kept getting a batch virus on the system. This had been roughly a weekly occurrence for a long while, (This was, as far as I know, a totally separate event to the forthcoming disk-failure.) which caused the machine to every now and again produce a stop-error – Better known as a BSOD or blue screen of death. The remedy was fairly routine: Remove C:\delnis.bat (The batch virus.) from the C: drive manually and run an antivirus and antispyware scan just to make sure there were no other nasties lurking on the system.

It came as no surprise, then, that around Thursday lunchtime a BSOD occurred, and on reboot I found C:\delnis.bat on the system and removed it. It did come as a surprise, however, that another BSOD occurred during the subsequent antivirus scan, followed by another that evening. This time I couldn’t find any malware on the machine.

On the Friday a BSOD occurred during bootup, and Microsoft suggested I run the Windows Live OneCare online scanner to see if I had any malware, as they thought I might have spooldr.sys on the machine. The scan reported that the machine was clear of malware, after which followed another BSOD. This time on reboot the CHKDSK facility ordered a disk check which I allowed, and deleted several corrupted sectors plus repaired the file system and restored those sectors.

“Ah; it was a file-system error!” I thought to myself, angry at the fact that I hadn’t thought of it before the machine did. I settled down to work, but got a BSOD during writing an article. Once again, CHKDSK sprang into action and repaired several file-system errors. Having finished the job, the machine BSOD’d again when it tried to reboot – every time it tried to reboot. Now it wouldn’t even start properly.

I’d seen and heard of this recent behavior before, and it was clear to me that the main hard-disk containing the C: drive was a gonner.

Now pay attention; as you don’t want to make the same mistakes as I did

I had a recent backup which I’d made using Windows Automated System Recovery on the D: drive, which I’d also copied to the external hard-drive. The D: drive was a larger second hard-disk which I’d fitted inside the machine when I built it and which I used to store many files which I also had backed up to my second machine. Since I was short of spare hard-disks, I changed the SATA connections on the motherboard’s SATA controller to make the D: drive be seen as the primary boot drive: In other words I disconnected the defunct C: drive’s SATA cable and connected the D: drive’s SATA cable in its place.

Before proceeding any further I checked that everything was OK by attempting to boot. The computer reported the expected message that C:\ntldr was not found; which was correct as it wasn’t installed. Without thinking properly I ran the Automated System Recovery from the BIOS screen, inserted the appropriate floppy into drive A:, and the machine read the information from it that the backup was on drive D:. It then proceeded to format the new C: drive which had been drive D:. Um – S**t!

Fortunately I had a copy of the backup on the external hard-drive; which I connected to USB, and which the machine happily accepted as drive D while installing Windows XP Pro. I left it to install by itself, and went to the kitchen to make coffee.

On my return I was horrified to discover that Windows Setup had decided to format drive D: and was already doing so. My recent backup was lost!

To cut an even longer story short I decided to start again with a brand new install, seeing that most, if not all, of my files were also stored on my second computer (as a stroke of luck).

As a result of the above I make the following recommendations to you:

• Don’t back up your data to an internal drive; even if you do have a second hard-disk installed on your machine.
• Don’t connect any external drives during restore except for the one on which the backup you’re restoring to the machine resides.
• Don’t use Windows Automated System Recovery which ships with XP Professional. It was developed a long time ago by Microsoft. Not enough thought went into it during Microsoft’s usual rush to get another OS to market. Yes, I know that I recently said that I use it as one of my three backup systems. That’s going to change: I’m now going to use Paragon Drive Backup instead.
• Do, if you can, have a second computer on which copies of your files are stored: Just in case the worst happens.
• Do, if you can, use an online backup facility such as Backblaze or Carbonite, in addition to an offline backup such as an external hard-drive. It’ll cost you; but it could end up saving you time and money.
• Use Acronis True Image or Paragon Drive Backup as your offline backup software. I personally recommend these in that order.
• And finally: Don’t be lazy or try to cut corners like I did above by using an existing internal drive as a replacement: Don’t be a Sharron – Don’t be tight and impatient. You might end up regretting it even if you do know or think you know what you’re doing. I should take my own advice from now onwards.