Acronis - the lifesaver - Again!!

[-pops-]

I booted up my main machine yesterday and it seemed to be taking ages to achieve anything other than load the desktop. The cursor moved OK but nothing else would load and clicking the mouse just caused a freeze up.

After some highly scientific investigation (took the "C" drive out and put a replacement in) it was apparent that the drive was not in very good condition. Not having a new drive available as replacement I ordered a much larger drive from dabs to exchange with the now puny 80GB that was in there.

The drive arrived this morning (thanks, dabs for good service), I formatted, installed and loaded the OS from my Acronis backup. It loaded in nine minutes!!!!!! and apart from not finding an Internet connection on the first boot, everything is as it should be.

One thing which is very apparent is how quiet the machine is now. I'm all for quiet computers but this one must have been increasingly noisy for quite a time and I didn't notice. It is now all but silent and I haven't even put the side back on yet.

Friday is normally "backup day" but, as I wasn't able to do this week's, the backup I installed from was a week old but, but, but, I've not lost anything as I use Second Copy to keep all my changing documents up to date.

I'm happy today, thank you Acronis - and dabs.

Moral of this - make backups and keep them up to date. No use making just one backup and forgetting about doing any more - that's worse than not having one in the first place.

[AlanHo]

It must be the season for disk failures.

I booted my computer last Monday and the desktop failed to load properly - superimposed with a message that drive D: could not be found - insert a disc. (Drive D: is my data had drive)

I rebooted and all was well - but later in the day whilst the computer was running it happened again - Drive D: just vanished. I took a look in Control Panel - but it was gone.

I opened the case and had a prod at the SATA connections - rebooted and it started OK - only for the same thing to happen an hour later. Not being sure whether it was the hard drive , SATA cable or motherboard I fitted a new cable and used a different SATA port on the mobo and all was well for the rest of the day - lulling me into the belief I had fixed it.

The following morning it booted OK and I did my morning computer chores - leaving the computer running. When I retuned to the study a couple of hours later the error message was there and the hard drive had gone AWOL again. So I ordered a replacement with the intention of claiming against the Seagate 5 year warranty.

The following day the new drive arrived and like you pops - I used Acronis and Second copy to reload all my data which went fine. The computer has remained trouble free.

However - I have a second computer in the house at present and installed the defunct drive as a third drive to see what would happen. 3 days later it is still working OK which leaves me very concerned at events. Is it - or isn't it - a faulty hard drive.

Any suggestions about what I should do now to prove it one way or t'other.

[-pops-]

Couldn't be bothered to make a claim - I just prised the cover up and poured hydrochloric acid into the body of the drive.

[AlanHo]

Couldn't be bothered to make a claim - I just prised the cover up and poured hydrochloric acid into the body of the drive.

If that is some magical repair method - you should patent it..... :lol:

[-pops-]

No. It fizzed a lot and lots of fumes came out. Hopefully it no longer contains recoverable information.