Professor Geek

I spent most of the morning today replacing a bad hard drive. I came home from a night class last night and found my computer in a half-booted state. Every attempt at reboot would fail, including safe mode. Furthermore, the hard drive light would not go out. The hard drive had worked itself to death.

This morning I bought a new drive, replacing my old 60 gb drive with a new 120 mb model. The total time it took me to take out the old drive, put in the new one, and have my computer exactly where I left off yesterday was about 2 hours. How did I do it?

I set up my desktop machines with two internal hard drives. The primary drive is my main workhorse. But I keep a second drive for backup purposes. I run a copy of Norton Ghost that is automatically set to back up once a week and then do daily incremental backups. It is automated, happens at 2 in the morning, and writes drive images to my backup drive. When my primary drive failed, I simply had to replace it with the new one and then follow this procedure:

1. Boot to the Maxtor CD that came with my hard drive to partition and format the drive (NTFS). This could also be done with your original Windows CD.
2. Boot my computer with the Norton Ghost boot CD
3. Point Norton Ghost to the backup image on my backup drive
4. Wait about an hour while Norton Ghost restored the image to my new hard drive (automatically increasing the drive size to accomodate my new, larger drive)
5. Reboot and pick up where I left off. I only lost a couple of things (what had been done since the last backup) but they were minimal

The moral of the story? Good backup procedures (using excellent software like Norton Ghost) pay large dividends when you have a problem.

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