Did You Ever Have One of Those Weeks?

The title tells it all sometimes.

This past week was one of those. If I had a nickel for every time I say back it up, I would be rich.  So here is the story of just one client reaching out for help with lost files.

I normally only focus on my grocery client business issues, but a great client of years was stressed out and turned to the geek for aid. Seems the 6-month-old laptop stop booting u,p and while for some it would not be an issue—just reload—in this case stored movies of a first child were in jeopardy.

So I had the hard drive sent to me to see if I could work a miracle.

First came out the Windows and DOS standby of chkdsk /f. Failed.

Next was Spinwrite form grc.com (Gibson Research Corp) www.grc.com. Repaired, sort of.

Linux – Tool box of anything I could think of went to work. Failed.

OK, so lots of fails and some repairs of the drive, but the issue was still there and the data was gone and for good. Seems the drive's first few bytes of normally-stored boot records were damaged. To make matters worse, the drive looks to have been bumped, and hard, during a write cycle that caused a head issue on one of the four read/write heads. The head is the part of the drive that floats millimeters above the platters and may have contacted the surface. (Bad. Really bad.)

So with these details, I called a mom and gave the bad news of lost youth, not just data. You could hear the stress in the voice, and I’m sure the tears fell after I hung up. It’s so sad when solutions exist and cheap ones at that. Take the time and backup the critical today because your calls of sadness will be just that. Sad!

CAW this week is a backup tool – Windows Backup (System 7)

Head into your control panel and find “Backup and Restore” (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/features/backup-and-restore) for how to use this free feature.