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Sigh, damned windoze again
Aug. 19th, 2009 09:31 pmGary called me at work this evening in an absolute panic. He was sure his hard drive had crashed and he'd lost everything. Now, I know that alone doesn't mean he has lost everything, because he's absolutely anal retentive about making backups. He has two external drives that he backs up to, and keeps one of them at his mom's house in case ours is destroyed, switching them every week or two. At the worst, he should have lost whatever he has done since the last backup, which would have been on Friday.
There are, of course, many other possible causes when Windows (XP Pro SP3 in this case) suddenly does a blue screen and then insists it can't find the bootable partition on the hard drive. He insists on trusting Bill Gates though so he did what most users will do. He reset the computer, and when it came up it found the partition all right. Unfortunately, it also found "errors" on it and started scandisk, which promptly trashed the file system by relinking and deleting stuff with abandon. After doing that for some time, then it couldn't find enough of the OS left to run from. God only knows what it trashed, or whether any of his data is still recoverable.
What's worse is, on the advice of the "experts" he bought his system from, it has two 150 GB drives configured together in RAID 0 as a single 300 GB. Given his paranoia about losing data, they should have been running in tandem as shadow drives instead. This configuration probably means that if one of the drives has in fact had a physical crash, the other's data is no longer salvageable except perhaps by an expensive expert service.
All I could do over the phone is tell him not to do anything more that would write to the drives, and let me bring home recovery tools on CD (of which I do have some) so we could look at and assess the damage. Fortunately for me, he then called another of our friends who is much better at Windows than I am and who agreed to look at it for him on Friday. Since he goes to his mom's tomorrow anyway, and would be away from the machine most of the day, that's not such a big delay. He'll probably have to replace at least one drive, and restore the OS from his installation CDs. Whether he can get back any of the data is doubtful now, but he should be able to get back to Friday's versions.
I'm going to have to think seriously about building a network file server with a RAID 5 configuration to take care of this issue once and for all. He gets so stressed about these things that it ties MY stomach in knots. Getting him off Windows and into an environment (Mac or Linux, I don't care) that doesn't have Microsoft's knotty and disastrous registry involved just isn't going to happen. His classes start on Monday again, and of course the school is absolutely sold out to commercial Windows products to the point that students can't survive in his department if they are running any other OS.
There are, of course, many other possible causes when Windows (XP Pro SP3 in this case) suddenly does a blue screen and then insists it can't find the bootable partition on the hard drive. He insists on trusting Bill Gates though so he did what most users will do. He reset the computer, and when it came up it found the partition all right. Unfortunately, it also found "errors" on it and started scandisk, which promptly trashed the file system by relinking and deleting stuff with abandon. After doing that for some time, then it couldn't find enough of the OS left to run from. God only knows what it trashed, or whether any of his data is still recoverable.
What's worse is, on the advice of the "experts" he bought his system from, it has two 150 GB drives configured together in RAID 0 as a single 300 GB. Given his paranoia about losing data, they should have been running in tandem as shadow drives instead. This configuration probably means that if one of the drives has in fact had a physical crash, the other's data is no longer salvageable except perhaps by an expensive expert service.
All I could do over the phone is tell him not to do anything more that would write to the drives, and let me bring home recovery tools on CD (of which I do have some) so we could look at and assess the damage. Fortunately for me, he then called another of our friends who is much better at Windows than I am and who agreed to look at it for him on Friday. Since he goes to his mom's tomorrow anyway, and would be away from the machine most of the day, that's not such a big delay. He'll probably have to replace at least one drive, and restore the OS from his installation CDs. Whether he can get back any of the data is doubtful now, but he should be able to get back to Friday's versions.
I'm going to have to think seriously about building a network file server with a RAID 5 configuration to take care of this issue once and for all. He gets so stressed about these things that it ties MY stomach in knots. Getting him off Windows and into an environment (Mac or Linux, I don't care) that doesn't have Microsoft's knotty and disastrous registry involved just isn't going to happen. His classes start on Monday again, and of course the school is absolutely sold out to commercial Windows products to the point that students can't survive in his department if they are running any other OS.
