Before trying to repair a friend computer's hard drive

yboivin · Apr 30, 2013

Hi,

A friend gave me her computer saying that it said "disk error" in Windows... The laptop sits there since Sunday and I ponder on what to do first.

My idea was to do a COLD Ghost backup of the drive on an external drive to keep most of the data on the drive before trying to fix the problem. Being a cold backup, no Windows OS present on the drive is involved, only the Ghost program loaded from the CD drive...

From experience (22 years around computers), the drive in the laptop will only get READS calls and NO writes whatsoever... This will keep the drive from writing over bad sectors. You can, and must in this case, tell Ghost to IGNORE bad sectors during the backup.

This will produce a most complete copy of the drive for future usage if ever I have to replace the drive and restore the backup... But before proceding, I would like to have your ideas and toughts on the procedure I propose...

What did I forgot and what would you propose ?

Thanks !

Yves

qazzi · May 1, 2013

hmmm how about running diagnostic on the drive first. (ie seatools). and also try chkdsk /f before try a recover.

popatim · May 1, 2013

You can do a ghost if you want but if windows is corrupt and you replace the drive you're still going to wind up reinstalling windows. I would be more concerned with copying the recovery partition(s) because you know she never made her restore dvd's. LOL
and then go in and copy the entire users folder which should grab just about all of her personal files.

nevada51 · May 3, 2013

All I can suggest in my experience is to go for the recovery partitions and user data first and foremost (as popatim has suggested).

Even if you tell ghost to ignore bad sectors, you will get a 'complete' image, but one that you'd be potentially unable to restore to a new drive as the bad sectors would be effectively 'empty', meaning any data they contained would be gone as well. (Which, could be anything, DLL files, registry hives... anything - so you'd end up having to reinstall windows anyway I'd expect)

You could use something like Hiren's Boot CD or UBCD4WIN to potentially examine the disk and scan/fix it outside of windows as fixing inside of windows can be quite troublesome and somewhat risky.

Aaron Simmons · May 3, 2013

Here's what I always try to do:
1. If you have a spare hard drive lying around, image (bit-wise copy?) the plagued disk with something like clonezilla onto the spare drive.

2. Then boot up a linux distribution like PartedMagic or Ubuntu from a live cd. It has recovery tools as well as tools for reading the SMART data from the drive.

3. I would check the SMART data first to see if there are any outstanding physical problems with the disk. That way you know immediately if a replacement will be necessary.

4. If nothing's there, you can run an extended test on the disk itself for any bad/unrepairable sectors.

4.5 If Step 3 finds a physical issue on the disk or Step 4 finds irreparable sectors, I would order a new hdd/ssd, and boot up clonezilla and restore that image onto the new disk, then start from step 4 again.

5. Jump back into the windows recovery tools and try to repair the disk with its automated process

6. If that works, you should be ok! If not, continue onto 7...

7. Jump back into your linux distro, and follow this guide to try to repair it, or the one it links to if you're using PartedMagic: http://linuxexpresso.wordpress.com/2011/09/20/howto-fix-an-ntfs-partition-in-ubuntu/

8. Test if windows works again (windows will probably want to recheck the partition again). If it doesn't, then continue to 9.

9. At this point, you may be stuck with just re-installing windows (at least I would give up after this point). So boot up the Linux distribution one last time and see if you can open the disk in the file explorer (eg. dolphin). Usually you can even if windows has problems. Copy the user's files onto an external disk. Re-install windows on either the problem disk or a new one if you're exceptionally paranoid, and copy the files back on for the user.

Note: If you ever end up in a situation where you suddenly have less access to the disk than you did before after running a test or repair, you made a backup with clonezilla in step 1. Just restore the files from that bit-wise copy, and continue from the step after the one that seemed to make things worse.

yboivin · May 3, 2013

Hi,

I'm the OP. Boy, am I glad I had a very bad toothache and needed to get a tooth extracted, which KEPT me from doing work on the aformentionned computer !

I'm flaberghasted at multiple things with answers I got to my thread ! I knew I was in the best place to get solid answers to my question and I more than got them. Even more, I got to know a little something more that made me realise, again, for about 100 times in 22 years, that you always need to ask questions when in ANY doubt and learn more every chance you get...

I'll explain: for years I've been "protecting myself" by doing frequent, and I mean really frequent, Ghosts of my Windows drive, knowing that someday it would save my life and it more than once did... You know the scenario: you go ahead of things and install drivers, specially for graphic cards it seems, and those start almost immediatly giving you real bad problems and THEN you wish for a way to get back where you were before, not relying on Windows System Restore who would fail at it 50% of the time whenever I tried it...

It happened probably to all of us a few times and, at least for me, got me into the routine of taking a Ghost as soon as my laptop/desktop was running very well and stable for at least 2-4 weeks and where I was really satisfied with it and/or before installing something that had the potential to give problems afterword. This habit saved me at least four times in the last 5 years and I'm glad I used most evolutions of Ghost all those years. At least I WAS glad, before reading answers to this thread tonight. Every time I take a Ghost, I tell it to ignore bad sectors, thinking that those would be handled either by the disk firmware and/or by the OS who would find a "magical" way to rewrite the bad data somewhere else on the drive...

Now, I get to read Nevada51's answer and now I understand how futile that idea on my part is. I came to understand the reasoning with Nevada's answer almost instantly and I tought I was "protected". You do are protected IF you have a drive in perfect working order ! Know I know a little more but something quite important !

Then I read the thread again and Yo ! I get three documented AND working solutions on how to get it done right ! Man, did I printed this thread fast, not taking ANY chances that this knowledge gets losts on me by Gamma rays from the Sun or ANY other freaking means that happens one in a billion times ! Kidding aside, I did print the thread for immediate reference and saved the content to a file on my data drives.

Notice I wrote "drive" in plural as I have one main drive that gets ALL my data and two more that are getting a backup of the files that changed (over a full copy the first time I started doing this), every night, not relying on any special backup software but on Robocopy from MS which I got to use on the Windows Server 2003 RDK. I find this a good way to take backups and it leaves me with a REAL copy of the files instead of relying on RAID technology which for some reasons I don't thrust much. But that's me and to each is own as long as it works for you. Now, I know I may get even more comments to the thread on my backup strategy and how, maybe, I'm missing something and how it should REALLY be done. That would be a huge bonus and I'm all in to knew knowledege after what I got already !

Know for sure that I appreciate ALL your answers and that I'll be burning Live CD's tonight and be really glad about that tooth ! Somehow I never tought I get to say this !

Thanks guys !

nevada51 · May 4, 2013

Glad you found my answer enlightening

To expand a little more upon it, any kind of 'image' technology, ghost/imagex/acronis/etc relies on the fact the source hardware is flawless.

The reason for this is, as I outlined above. If you have bad blocks on your drive but there is no data there (yet), then you could potentially dodge a bullet as most imaging systems will only clone the drive as much as it has data, it won't necessarily also do a bit-copy (which is to copy literally everything on the drive, data + free space).

To be protected, you'd need to do a little more than just a single ghost - I don't know if ghost supports what I'm going to suggest but there is plenty of room with it to amend it to suit your work patterns and what you have available.

1) Take 1 GOOD ghost backup of your laptop in perfect working order. This is your starting block.
2) Every week/2-weeks/month - depending on how often you change the OS/Applications, take another ghost, this time, make it an incremental OR differential (assuming ghost can do either).
3) Use a file-based backup (robocopy for example) to backup your important data at the end of each day, so things that if you lost it, you couldn't do without. You can also use this method to backup applications, but you'd only be backing up application files, not the installation data.
4) Do all this to an external drive of some kind, an internal drive is fine but if your PC/laptop ever seriously dies or gets stolen or whatever - you lose everything.

Now - the difference between incremental and differential backup operations are as follows:

Incrementals work from one backup to the next, so they only backup what has changed between the current backup and the last backup. This keeps them relatively small and backup times can be quick.
Big problem with them is if 1 of your incremental backups has a fault or becomes corrupted, you lose all backups afterwards as well.

E.g.

M->1->2->3->4

M = Master Image
x = Incremental Backup

If any of your incrementals become corrupted, you lose all backups AFTER the corrupted backup also, so there is a risk involved with them.

Differentials work differently, they backup all changes from the MASTER backup to the current backup each time. This makes them far more robust in the event of failure, but their sizes can be large and the backup speed is not as fast as incrementals.

If you make few changes to OS/Apps, differentials may be a better choice. Vice-versa, if you make lots of changes, incrementals may work better.

It does all come down to how important the data is to you and how much resources you can allocate to your backup solution, there is nothing to stop you doing a normal ghost each week/2-weeks/month, but this typically overwrites what you had before and you could potentially lose the previous backup, especially if your backup corrupts half way through saving.

Personally, I use Acronis Backup and Restore (I hasten to add I do NOT work for them, I'm a happy consumer of their products) - do incremental backups each week and file-level backups every day. I don't make changes to my OS or Apps that much and reading back my own advice, I should probably change them to differentials

Hope that helps

yboivin · May 4, 2013

I KNEW I'll get something more of this thread ans I did ! When the iPhone shirped not long after I went to bed but before I can get to sleep (yeah, that's that small of a flat I live in these days) I kind of tought: "Yet another email, I hope that's a good one !". Then, on further thinking, I got up and came to the laptop, remembering that the thread is on tomshardware.co.UK and that you, kind people, would already be woked-up ! And I'm glad I did as it was indeed one !

Now, certainly all of you remarked that I'm kind of long winded ! This thread deserves a good comment, better that just Thanks ! I'll be brief this time around because I have to get somewhere in an hour or so and I need time to frame what I want to say, completly and still be short enough that it won't bother you all reading it !

I'll be back during the W-E !

Until then !

Yves

Search

Before trying to repair a friend computer's hard drive

yboivin

Honorable

qazzi

Distinguished

popatim

Titan

nevada51

Distinguished

Aaron Simmons

Honorable

yboivin

Honorable

nevada51

Distinguished

yboivin

Honorable

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page