14 hours later..and the data off that dead HDD is safe :-)

What a long long struggle.

My friends at my old work had one PC that was paramount to their entire business.

5 years old "Matt...it wont boot anymore"
Moreover though a new PC is cheap, the software installed needs to be done by the IT Management company, at £350 per day, plus getting it configured to the Intra Net that is used by the mother company involved another visit by someone else....another £250.

That poor little 20gig drive was wailing and grinding, but with a few nasty smacks and jiggling the drive into different angles I got it to boot a few times...but it was 50-60 scrolls of the Windows Taskbar on boot up.
And 50 % of the time it died part way through.

So....I lay it vertical, where it made least noise, when it WAS running, clonked it hard when I hit the power button to help it spool up and then blew a house fan in on it (seemed to help!!) I got best results with it on its side...I guess the heads were under least gravity effect on that side.

I installed (very slowly) Drive Image 7 and tried copying across to the new drive. This PC took 3 minutes per click to respond to anything.

2 hours...failed at 99%

1 hour (much faster this time) failed at 56%

Then I put the new hard drive and the old knackered one into my own PC, on the EIDE plugs, and using my SATA drives for my own operating PC, used Drive Image 7 from my own PC to copy from old to the new EIDE to take the strain off the HDD.

Seemed to work but failed to boot the old PC as it got stuck at 99% and I left it for 2 hours and it did nowt.

After 12 attempts...it copied.

Job done. Happy people, and all the people get paid on time, the stock order can be done...and you just know it'll occur again one day.

It is very satisfying when you manage something like that, but sadly, it doesnt happen to me very often.

Did you get them to backup their stuff better for future?

:)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Clunk

It is very satisfying when you manage something like that, but sadly, it doesnt happen to me very often.

Did you get them to backup their stuff better for future?

:)

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Does the Pope have a flying lesson booked with me later this week in a Mk2 C Hurricane? Nahh.....

Besides..it's not an issue of backing up....that software must be installed by the relevant companies and they all charge a fortune for the daily rates and call outs :(

Erm, did you say you tried to boot from the broken hard drive and install dive image and then try and create an image??!!

surely it would have been better to image it from a working computer using someting like drive image xml from runtime.org??

or have i got it all wrong?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by nvening

Erm, did you say you tried to boot from the broken hard drive and install dive image and then try and create an image??!!

surely it would have been better to image it from a working computer using someting like drive image xml from runtime.org??

or have i got it all wrong?

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no..you got it right. I was at the business and had no spare PC.

Eventually I had to take it home to sort.

Even then...it was hard work.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Zak33

no..you got it right. I was at the business and had no spare PC.

Eventually I had to take it home to sort.

Even then...it was hard work.

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Whose business and did you give them a right lecture about getting their priorities sorted.
Unless it was a charity I would have charged them for being such tight idiots with such a vital part of their business.
If it was friends, I would have made them donate £100 to charity for that.

Hehe, i remember kicking (hard) my old 120mb hard drive circa 1992 back into life to copy the data back off it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Zak33

2 hours...failed at 99%

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noooo! the pain! :eek:

However, alot of job satisfaction in the end I bet! I do enjoy a challenge :)

why does everything always fail at 99%

ALWAYS!! :angst: