On 4/23/2012 10:53 AM, Warp wrote:
> Patrick Elliott<kag### [at] gmailcom>  wrote:
>> Anyone have any ideas how to fix this? Still a lot of shit on the old
>> machine I use every day, since its not transferred to the new machine
>> yet. :(
>
>    I know this is just pouring salt on the wound, and it doesn't help you
> solve the problem, but... Whenever you have some important data that you
> don't want to lose in one single place, usually a hard drive, you are
> taking the conscious risk of losing it.

The single most annoying thing about this is, well, three most annoying 
things:

1. Almost every "recovery" system relies on the machine booting 
properly, to restore the contents. Unless you are making whole images of 
the disk (which is a massive problem itself, to span across DVDs/CDs, 
this is a major problem. In this case, I can't even get the disk 
diagnostic, which boots its own OS and software, from a floppy, to boot, 
so it would need to be something run from a live CD (which did boot). 
Possible, but not necessarily if the failure was of the type, and scale, 
I had here.

2. The type of failure can matter. If the drive isn't recoverable, for 
some reason, you need a new drive, and well...

3. Finally, and this is the biggest one for me, and most people: How? I 
mean, DVDs are not a great solution, and the "backup" utilities, 
especially on XP, don't always support them properly. But, in general, 
short of another drive, or a tape system (expensive), there is no real 
good way to do it, not without multiple DVDs, or multiple something 
else, or, in the case of the one solution I did have, the bloody useless 
"backup" software, which just made backups of "known data types". Not 
programs, not settings, not anything that didn't register "document" to 
it. And, that could be thousands of things, some of which *are* data, 
except just not the sort of data that has a nice label, like jpg, or 
xls. And, there are so many of those crappy assed "solutions" out there 
that its hard to find the ones that are not total crap.

So, yeah, I have done backups, now and then. But it wouldn't have done a 
damn thing for me in this case, since the stuff I need isn't a) 
readable, or b) restorable, unless I could get the drive to boot again 
somehow. And, there was never any practical way to do a complete backup. 
Not with what I had available to do it. :( And restoring it from the 
backup..., well, that isn't much easier, without a solution that 
actually does that sort of thing for you, and correctly.

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