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Who moved my Cheeeeeeeeeeese.
Scroll wheel down to scroll up anyone?
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... update from the field-hospital at the front: mirabile dictu the gone-awol hard-drive has now reappeared after several re-boots ... viewing it in "This PC" it appears with a red content-utilized bar rather than the usual blue ... signifying, I guess, "wounded." ...
Another small triumph for the demons: today, I tried doing a Win System Image (8.1) back-up onto a 1.5 gig (Sata 3.0) hard-drive (with lots of free space); it failed, and now the 1.5 gig Tb drive won't mount. I've done the usual bit about dis-connecting the drive and re-connectiing, re-booting, examining the BIOS info, etc.
The fact the fried-critter don't show up in the BIOS is, I assume, a death sentencel, but I'll try mounting it on another machine and see what happens.
Whilst the drive is still under warranty, and replacement under warranty here in Thailand (for WD drives) is fast and no-questions-asked, and no inscrutable forms to fill-out, this drive happens to have my entire prized collection of movies, downloaded British TV programs, music, etc., on it 
Now: don't you feel happy because this didn't happen to you; doesn't it make you just want to smirk and utter profound platitudes like "one back-up is never enough" ?
cheers, Bill
«I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center» Kurt Vonnegut.
modified 3-Jun-15 12:11pm.
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BillWoodruff wrote: smirk and utter profound platitudes like "one back-up is never enough"
Ummm... if the data existed only on the failed HD then it wasn't really a back-up at all. 
Contrary to popular belief, nobody owes you anything.
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Go ahead, Brother Mike, rub my nose in it 
«I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center» Kurt Vonnegut.
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Just send it to Bill 
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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BillWoodruff wrote: a 1.5 gig
Isn't that a wee bit small?
Marc
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Marc Clifton wrote: Isn't that a wee bit small?
Why, "yes," Brother Marc: for a man of your Gargantuan stature 1.5 gigs would not back-up a smidgen's-worth of those of your neurons hat contain only the memory of one day !
I use the term "Gargantuan" here because, unfortunately, as in the case of "schadenfreude," English has no "native" word that refers directly to the weltanschauung of his fellow-giant son, "Pantagruel," of whose philosophy's guiding ethos Rabelais wrote: "une certaine gaîté d'esprit confite dans le mépris des choses fortuites" ... "a certain gaiety of mind pickled in the scorn of fortuitous things."
cheers, Bill
«I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center» Kurt Vonnegut.
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A serious question: Which app did you use to create the image when the drive was fried?
How do we preserve the wisdom men will need,
when their violent passions are spent?
- The Lost Horizon
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I was using the MS Win 8.1 file history => create system image facility. Years ago I used to use "Drive Snapshot," a lean/mean excellent (commercial) utility, but, as I went on to Win 7/8, I just used the built-in Win facilities.
thanks, Bill
«I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center» Kurt Vonnegut.
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Thanks for the response!
How do we preserve the wisdom men will need,
when their violent passions are spent?
- The Lost Horizon
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If you are asking because you need to do one, I'm currently trying the free version of APMEI Backupper[^] as I'm looking for something before I update to Win10 next month. So far, I've created an image, but I need to do a trial restore which means dismantling the PC to fit a "disposable" disk so I'll try it probably this weekend. I'll generate a Windows System Image tonight and compare them.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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I have several questions about the same thing, I mean, how can you determine that a disk image save can really restore without physically removing the hard drive and temporarily installing a similar drive and then trying to restore the system?
Does the temporary hard drive have to match the original exactly? What about the boot sector?
How does this work with laptops (my current system is a lappie)? I have never opened it up. I would have to go out and buy a spare hard drive to even attempt this.
How can you verify that ALL the data was restored - just take another disk image and compare the disk images? Would the second disk image be correct if the hard drives had different sizes (the temporary COULD be smaller as long as there was enough space to restore the data , right?)
Back in 2000 - 2007 I did many disk image saves and restores, but I used PowerQuest, ran XP on a desktop, and never changes the hardware. Now that I am on a Pavilion, running W7, and using the internal tools, I just wonder "What would happen if.....".
Dave.
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It's a real problem: if you don't test a backup by doing a "worst case" restore trial then you can't have confidence that you have everything you need! 
So with images, you do need a "dead" computer to restore onto - which in practice means swapping out the HDD for me as the hardware has to be correct for the restored image to work afterwards. (Fortunately, I just upgraded to a new 16TB NAS, so I have 4 * 1TB HDDs in my old one that I want to erase before I sell the old box anyway...)
Even with "normal" backups, you do need to do a trial restore to be sure that your media works, you have backed up the right files, and that it actually does something! I've had occasions when I didn't know the backup hardware has broken, storing black disks off site for a year or two until I needed to restore... Loads of swear words were involved here.
And I've known companies where backups of the wrong disk were religiously completed at the end of every week.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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OG,
Thank you for the reply.
One thing I finally figured out, W7 Pro will not write an image to a GPT formatted (4 TB drive). It goes through the motions, but crashes with an error at the very end. I had to write the images to a smaller (1/2 TB) hard drive, then copy the created directory to the 4TB normal backup driveS (note the plural - never trust a backup to a single drive).
Another thing, the image program tells you how big of a flash drive you would need to do the save. I tried it with a flash drive of that size and it crashed at the very end (after I had gone out and bought some 16 B flash drives just for the image saves). It turns out that it really needed 18.1 GB instead of just the 16 GB it claimed it needed (I found this out when I finally tried the 1/2 TB drive the first time).
Another major change I've noticed, W7 Pro has an entirely new Windows Explorer than W7 home premium (that I have on my own lappie). Mine looks and reacts just like the old XP Explorer. The Pro version has a drastically different interface, i.e. there is no more Shift Delete to just delete a file/directory, it copies it to the recycle bin and you have to empty it to get rid of it. There is a menu option to always just delete the file, but that is kind of dangerous.
I guess I'll have to learn how to get the hard drive out of the lappie, get a new replacement and install it and then try to restore it. If it works, then take another image save (to the 1/2 TB drive) and FC compare all the files created. I wonder how many places I will find date/time differences???
OBTW, this system is the wife's, and if I totally break it, then "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen, nobody knows...."
Dave.
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As a pc support tech by trade I can tell you today's drives are criminally crap.
They are a unthinkable place to put anything you hold dear.
Back them up every night and if possible backup the backups.
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And backup the backups of the backups. At least get yourself a Blue Ray drive that will hold 25GB on a single disc and burn your data to a set of BR discs.
How do we preserve the wisdom men will need,
when their violent passions are spent?
- The Lost Horizon
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Cornelius Henning wrote: get yourself a Blue Ray drive that will hold 25GB on a single disc and burn your data to a set of BR discs.
Thanks, Brother Cornelius, please respond by private e-mail to this message with your credit card information, and a link to which on-line store you would like me to purchase said item with.
yours, Bill
«I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center» Kurt Vonnegut.
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My most sincere apologies! I did not take into account that a Blue Ray drive is so exorbitantly expensive!
How do we preserve the wisdom men will need,
when their violent passions are spent?
- The Lost Horizon
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Bill,
Can you pull the HDD out of the USB enclosure and place the HDD directly in a computer to see if it is visible in the BIOS?
If you do this, can see the HDD in the BIOS but Windows says it is not formatted, get the following.
Download Parted Magic (about USD$10.00), boot from the disk and see if you can mount it directly from the Linux based desktop. If this fails, then open the Terminal and run Testdisk.
If you get this far, search for a tutorial on line about using this to rescue data/fix the partition. If you can't find it, give me a yell and I will find where I put this link.
Michael Martin
Australia
"I controlled my laughter and simple said "No,I am very busy,so I can't write any code for you". The moment they heard this all the smiling face turned into a sad looking face and one of them farted. So I had to leave the place as soon as possible."
- Mr.Prakash One Fine Saturday. 24/04/2004
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Brother Michael, thanks very much for this very practical response !
For unknown reasons (possibly a teaser designed to lull me back into somnolence while the demons prepare an even greater misfortune), said WD hard-drive has re-appeared in the Bios after many reboots. I am now running chkdsk with options /f /r /x ... I see it's already fixed a few clusters, but it will take an eternity to complete the job.
cheers, Bill
«I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center» Kurt Vonnegut.
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I have a seemingly dead 2TB USB drive, coincidentally also a WD drive.
I will try to mount the drive directly and see if I can salvage it.
Thanks for the information Michael.
Once you lose your pride the rest is easy.
In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you. – Buddha
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You sure they're not just encrypted?
With full installs of 8.1, MS decided that everything should be encrypted. If you did a system backup to the drive, I wouldn't be shocked to find MS decided to encrypt it too.. for your data safety, of course. I don't know if their encryption goes so far as the partition table or not. Also, if it was a USB drive, it might have decided you asked it to wipe the drive and use it as a bootable recovery drive.. and that certainly would be encrypted if the original install was.
If the drive shows up under Linux, you may need to blast a few MB of zeros over the front if it before you can recreate the partition table. I've had to recover a few hard drives that way over the years. Windows is way too trusting of whatever garbage data is on the disk and can get terminally confused.
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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patbob wrote: You sure they're not just encrypted?
Yes I used to use it to play movies on my TV - which will not accept an encrypted drive - and then after a severe thunder storm, when I wasn't home to disconnect it, it failed.
Unfortunately, I also used it to back up other things, which are now beyond my ability to access. 
Once you lose your pride the rest is easy.
In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you. – Buddha
modified 4-Jun-15 14:01pm.
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