Recovering from dying hard drive and/or R&R?
Posted: Sun Nov 22, 2009 10:24 pm
My X60 Tablet's original HDD is flaking out. (story at end...)
The drive runs slowly and doesn't boot successfully, and might have data that I don't have backed up. I have my backups on a network mapped drive. I tried a R&R 3.1 startup CD, but it does NOT see the backup I took on the day the drive started dying (it sees only up to 10/10/2009). I think I probably upgraded R&R to 4.x at some point, so should I even expect R&R 3.1 to see that last backup? Also, when I select that 10/10 backup, it says that it "was created by a previous version of this program" - but that doesn't make any sense, since, if anything, it was created by a more recent version. Is it worth somehow getting a R&R 4.2 startup disk to see if it can see a more recent backup? Or somehow getting a R&R 4.x recovery partition?
My first priority is to recover all the data I can, and be able to access my files. I'd rather get those files from that backup (if it exists) than the flaky HDD. I have an unformatted 500GB notebook drive (that I'd like to be my main drive at the end of all this), and a lot of space on my desktop computer if needed. I don't have a SATA enclosure for 2.5'' drives specifically - but I think I can rig up the one I have that was made for 3.5'' (right?). In addition to that, the laptop's still under warranty, so I can probably send the drive in for a replacement (or can they send me the replacement first?) if I do it before January. I also have a bunch of Windows 7 licenses.
What's my best course of action?
* The disaster story: The laptop was in the middle of a scheduled backup (to a mapped network drive) when it kept getting stuck unable to read some files. I rebooted into SpinRite without really checking that the backup had finished (I saw no network activity, but that's probably no guarantee). SpinRite got bogged down trying to recover a string of bad sectors, and somehow in that process, a ton (~hundreds) of other sectors across the disk also went bad. The HDD's now gone past its SMART limits, so I figure more SpinRite'ing would be bad.
The drive runs slowly and doesn't boot successfully, and might have data that I don't have backed up. I have my backups on a network mapped drive. I tried a R&R 3.1 startup CD, but it does NOT see the backup I took on the day the drive started dying (it sees only up to 10/10/2009). I think I probably upgraded R&R to 4.x at some point, so should I even expect R&R 3.1 to see that last backup? Also, when I select that 10/10 backup, it says that it "was created by a previous version of this program" - but that doesn't make any sense, since, if anything, it was created by a more recent version. Is it worth somehow getting a R&R 4.2 startup disk to see if it can see a more recent backup? Or somehow getting a R&R 4.x recovery partition?
My first priority is to recover all the data I can, and be able to access my files. I'd rather get those files from that backup (if it exists) than the flaky HDD. I have an unformatted 500GB notebook drive (that I'd like to be my main drive at the end of all this), and a lot of space on my desktop computer if needed. I don't have a SATA enclosure for 2.5'' drives specifically - but I think I can rig up the one I have that was made for 3.5'' (right?). In addition to that, the laptop's still under warranty, so I can probably send the drive in for a replacement (or can they send me the replacement first?) if I do it before January. I also have a bunch of Windows 7 licenses.
What's my best course of action?
* The disaster story: The laptop was in the middle of a scheduled backup (to a mapped network drive) when it kept getting stuck unable to read some files. I rebooted into SpinRite without really checking that the backup had finished (I saw no network activity, but that's probably no guarantee). SpinRite got bogged down trying to recover a string of bad sectors, and somehow in that process, a ton (~hundreds) of other sectors across the disk also went bad. The HDD's now gone past its SMART limits, so I figure more SpinRite'ing would be bad.
.