Ibm Computer Storage System

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.

Ibm Computer Storage System 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!

Ibm Computer Storage System Recent Stories from around the internet

ibm computer storage system

SECAUCUS, N.J. - (Business Wire) ZT Systems today announced servers based on the newest Quad-Core AMD Opteron ™ processors, and will display platforms based on this new technology at the Supercomputing 2008 industry exposition. Codenamed ...

ZT Systems Announces Datacenter Servers Powered by New 45nm Quad-Core ... - Earthtimes

MILPITAS, Calif., Nov. 13 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- LSI Corporation (NYSE: LSI) today announced that Susan M. Whitney has been elected to its Board of Directors, effective November 12, 2008. Ms. Whitney is a former IBM Corporation executive who most ...

Former IBM Executive Susan Whitney Joins LSI Board - PR Newswire

Moore's Law may get a new lease on life thanks to a discovery jointly announced today by researchers at IBM and Purdue University. Named after former Intel co-founder and chairman, Gordon Moore, the well-known predict posits that the number of ...

Coop's Corner - CNET News

IBM is now offering 45-nanometer chipmaking "foundry" services based on its silicon-on-insulator technology. Foundries have become a big business in the chip industry. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the largest foundry in the ...

Nanotech - The Circuits Blog - CNET News

New System Accelerates Petascale Computation for Breakthrough Science and Engineering System Leverages 17 S2A9900 High Performance Storage Platforms Providing Eight Petabytes of Scalable Capacity and an Aggregate Speed of 95 Gigabytes Per Second ...

Argonne National Laboratory Deploys One of the World's Fastest ... - PR Newswire

Just five months after IBM 's hybrid Roadrunner became the first supercomputer to break the lofty petaflop barrier, a second, more traditional machine has made the same leap. And at least one industry watcher said the move of Cray's XT Jaguar ...

Jaguar, Roadrunner Race to Be Fastest - PC World

When Sun Microsystems named its latest data storage product "Fugu," after the poisonous blowfish served as a delicacy in Japan, it may have dropped an accidental hint about the company's current role in the tech food chain. Even as the struggling ...

What Sun Needs To Survive - Forbes

Flash memory is going corporate. Sun Microsystems Inc. (NSDQ: JAVA ) on Monday unveiled a new line of storage systems that will require about a quarter of the power – and cost about a quarter of the price – of competing systems. The power ...

Sun Micro: Flash Memory Goes Corporate - Seekingalpha.com

Twenty-five years ago this week, a youthful Bill Gates stood on stage at New York's posh Helmsley Palace Hotel to announce the future of computing: the Windows 1.0 operating system. Later that month, Gates would take the stage at the Comdex show in ...

After a Quarter Century of Windows - Enterprise IT Planet

SAN FRANCISCO/BOSTON, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Sun Microsystems Inc could be forced to sell itself or some of its assets as the economic crisis worsens problems facing the high-end computer maker, which has been struggling since the Internet bubble burst ...