Lessons from a Hard Drive Failure

You may have noticed that I’ve been absent for several days from the blogs and from Twitter. My main PC suffered a hard drive failure! Here’s the story:

Blue Screen of Death

I went to bed on 31st March having turned off my PC. On the morning of 1st April I turned it on and it just went into a loop of starting, offering to check the disc and then closing down. I tried all the options:

• Safe mode, safe mode with networking, last known good configuration
• Booting from Vista CD and asking for a repair

Nothing worked, and I was convinced that the famed Conflicker virus was somehow at fault. Eventually I hit upon the idea of booting via CD with Ubuntu, and finally the machine fired up. Ubuntu told me that there were serious disc errors, but allowed me (very, very slowly) to copy my data to an external hard drive.

I did have a backup, but it was over a week old, so I was grateful to recover the data. I won’t bore you with a lesson about back ups – just do them, and do them religiously!

The above took the best part of the day, so the following morning I headed to my computer shop and bought a new Seagate hard drive, which I immediately fitted.

I reinstalled Windows Vista, and was delighted to see my machine come back to life. What I hadn’t realized was that the hard work was just beginning. Until you have to reload every program, remember every password and go through more than 100 (yes really) Windows updates, you really have no idea how long these things take!

For the future, I’m going to explore mirroring my hard drive, and I’m also going to put more of my stuff onto Google Documents, but in the meantime here is a check list of things I’m going to do differently to make things easier, should this happen again. I would urge you to do the same:

• Keep a list on Google docs, or on my server, of what programs I actually have installed on my machine
• Keep a list on docs, or on my server, of the relevant product keys for MS office etc (yes mine were on the PC, I know, I know!)
• Start to use one of the many password keeper devices either on my phone or on line
• Move all my email to Gmail – I still had one account outside Gmail and using Outlook
• Keep a single folder on the backup drive of all the programs I use, so I can just work my way through and install Livewriter, Adobe Acrobat, Pea Zip etc, without having to download them again from the websites
• Don’t skip the backup reminder in my calendar, because “There are more important things to do today”

I’m sure many of you do all these things and more, but if the above can save one of you a little of the pain I have endured, then I’m happy.

I apologize for the interruption, normal service will now be resumed!

If you enjoyed this, please also look at:

1/ Google Chrome Beta

2/ What happens when you guest post on John Chow?

3/ More time for blogging – the two hour session