Yet another hard drive failure

[Michael McNamara]

It seems the hard drive in my wife's AMD64 X2 desktop is starting to die. I'm getting all sorts of unreadable sectors and while the Windows XP boots it will hang if I try to login. I'm currently copying all the important data over the network using the C$ administrative share.

I'm probably going to purchase a WD Raptor as her boot drive. I've had a WD Raptor as my boot drive for years and never had a problem... 10,000RPM doesn't seem to hurt any either.

While I'm rebuilding the OS I should probably upgrade to Windows 7... 32bit or 64bit I need to check to see if there are drivers for the Epson 3170 scanner she has.

Oh the joys of being your families technical support!

Cheers!

[Michael Haas]

i have had pretty good luck with windows 7, that being said at work we have decided to stay XP pro unless the lab needs 64-bit (autocad room we did in Win 7)

[Michael McNamara]

I actually ended up using Ubuntu 11.04 Live to boot the system, mount the disk and copy the data to another network share. There were some corrupt files but Ubuntu ripped through the copy of 40GB of user data in very short order. When I backed it up previously via Windows XP it would usually take hours over a 1Gbps connection but with Ubuntu 11.04 Live it literally flew through the copy even with the bad sectors and corrupt files.

I was genuinely impressed with Ubuntu 11.04... especially with just booting it from USB flash key or CD.

I did finally break down and order a HDD dock that supports both USB and eSATA. This will in theory allow me to backup the system to an external 1TB or 2TB drive and then store the drive when it's not being used.

The good news is I did manage to get just about all the data.

Cheers!