Bangladesh Computer Education In

Hard drive failure. What I did

Yesterday I had to change my hard drive and had a few issues that I was able to fix.

The problems started in the morning when my wife called me and told me that the computer would not boot. We have been having trouble with our hard drive for a while now and I was able to fix each time by just reseting the PC. This time though the computer was not seeing the hard drive. Using tools and knowledge that I had I had to do the following:

Install new hard drive

First of all I had to install the new hard drive. I was able to do this by disconnecting my CDR and leaving myDVD drive, two old hard drives in the machine, plus a new 80 gig drive with a 16 meg cache. I was unsuccessful at loading Windows though as I kept getting an error as the Windows setup was starting, after loading the drivers I would get an error that it could not load the setup. I switched to my CDR from the DVD drive and had no problems.

Setup Windows

I successfully did a quick format of the new drive (thanks for that new feature Windows XP) and successfully loaded Windows XP. This is pretty basic as I use a CD that not only has Windows XP on it but also has Service Pack 2 for XP slipstreamed onto it.

Rebuild hard drive partition table

After I booted to Windows I saw that my old drive was not showing up as a drive or a partition. If I right clicked on the partition in Disk Management it knew that the drive existed but could no longer find a partition on it. Windows Disk Management said that the drive was healthy, My first attempt was to create a partition but not to format the partition as I did not want to lose the data for good. I fought with this for a couple of hours as I did not back up lately and the wife would kill me if I lost all of her data. In the end I was able to use Test Disk from the Filesystem tools of the Dos Ultimate Boot Disk. It ends up that the partition table had a start but not an end and the program was able to fix this….whew I would have been in trouble….

Migrate Windows and Office data

After I had the old drive back I went into the BIOS and chose to boot from that drive. I was able to boot to the old Windows XP installation easily enough and did not want to keep any of the data there but thought it would be a good idea to transfer my Windows settings using the file and settings transfer wizard in Windows. I saved the settings using the wizard and chose this as the old computer and in the destination I chose a folder I created on the new hard drive called “transfer files”. I then decided to transfer only my settings as I knew that I was going to have to reload my software and would be manually copying over the file structure from the old drive to the new drive.

I also moved all of my settings for MS Office using the Save my Settings Wizard from the MS Office 2003 tools section. I was able to copy the settings, which come across as an OPS file to the same place as my Windows Transfer Files and Settings.

After I had moved the settings and files over I rebooted and went back into the BIOS and changed my first boot to the new hard drive and it’s windows XP installation. I was very happy to see that after running the wizrds for transfering the settings and after reloading MS Office 2003 I was able to move over my mail folder and saw all of my email, contacts, and best of all my email addresses (Still had to fill in the passwords for email but that’s OK). After a relogon I also had all of my desktop settings back includig the background picture of my daughter and the animated Pingu cursors.

Copy data from bad drive

Next I just did a blanket move of all of the files from the old hard drive to new into a new folder that I created in the root of the drive. I did this simply to save time as I am not sure about the stability of the old hard drive and fear that I will lose it again.

Reload software

I have started reloading software but as usual I am going to be slow about the move this time. I will install some of my favorite freewares and will install Streets and Trips, Adobe Acrobat, Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe Photoshop Elements and that’s it.

I have roughly followed about half of my Reloading Windows tutorial but since I have both drives functioning at the moment I have tried to cut some corners and make this work well as well as getting my wife up and running quickly for her work stuff this morning.

Bangladesh Computer Education In stuff to buy

Pal Pc Tracker - Stops Computer Theft!
Computer software that allows you to find your Pc anywhere in the world if it's ever lost or stolen!

How To Make Money Working From Home!
A practical, Step-By-Step guide to start making money on the Internet using your computer!

Cleaning Computers - Secrets Exposed!
How To Start Your Own Profitable Computer Cleaning Business - Step By Step Business Kit!

Bangladesh Computer Education In Recent Stories from around the internet

bangladesh computer education in

Employees at the Cheetah Conservation Fund's Biomass Energy Project use tech to convert bush into blocks of clean-burning fuel. (Credit: Biomass Energy Project, Cheetah Conservation Fund) A group working to save land in Namibia, projects bringing ...

Read all '"health"' posts in Cutting Edge - CNET News

Regions and Countries » Americas » Central Asia & Caucasus » East Asia » Eastern & Central Europe » Middle East & North Africa » Oceania » South Asia » Sub-Saharan Africa » Western Europe Countries » Afghanistan » Albania » Algeria ...

Kuduro: The Sexy Angolan Rhythm With a Message - Global Voices Online.org

While major research projects at universities often steal the show when it comes to tech and science news, it’s important not to forget the dedicated efforts of teams worldwide who are looking to safeguard the environment and bring a higher ...

The Tech Museum awards honor the most inspirational science stories ... - DailyTech

Kuala Lumpur, Oct 21 (IANS) Indian mathematics genius Shakuntala Devi, who is in Malaysia as part of her world tour, promises to turn ' maths haters into lovers... is the power to concentrate to awaken this gift,' the 69-year-old maths whiz 10th ...

Results 1 - 100 of about 2788 for cbse 10th class sample paper of ... - Newstrack India

Tense over the death of his unborn child and the atrocities meted out to his wife, a farmer from village Rajewal Rajputan committed suicide. Arvinder Singh, a farmer from the village committed suicide on Sunday after his pregnant wife was beaten up ...

Pregnant woman beaten up, husband commits suicide - Tribune

The police today unearthed 125 powerful crude bombs from a vacant plot at north Poilur, about 45 km from here. The moon impact probe (MIP) aboard the unmanned Chandrayaan-1 will be dropped on the lunar surface tomorrow marking the beginning of the ...

New Delhi, November 13 - Tribune

I didn't set out to like Suzanne Mubarak. Politically speaking, it would have been easier had I simply found her a pleasant do-gooder content with her role as First Lady. Although I enjoy politics, I’m also a foreigner, so for nearly seven years I ...

ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL - Egypt Today

Since they stood at only about two-and-a-half feet tall, a handful of three-year-olds assembled in front of a Bronx congressman’s office were having a difficult time getting their construction paper leaves on their 12 foot-tall “Tree of Peace ...

November October September August July June May April March February ... - Nypress.com

Abdul-Muyeed Chowdhury and Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the One Laptop Per Child foundation, have something in common: Both want to bring affordable computing to the developing world. But ask Chowdhury, the director of an organization working ...

One Virtual PC Per Child - Forbes

CHITTAGONG, Bangladesh , Oct. 17 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Asian University for Women (AUW), based in Chittagong, Bangladesh, today announced two new relationships with Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA; and, Aalborg University ...