When it all goes wrong

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jethro's picture

I have had an extremely frustrating morning so far.

Last night I went to bed early (midnight)with a fair amount of work in my job queue intending to arise early and get stuck into it.

First thing I noticed when sitting at my desk this morning was the PC had restarted it self - strange I thought. I logged in and then noticed that the local PC backup had failed. On checking why I noticed that a hard drive was missing. Further checks revealed that  hard drive had failed in the night - maybe the cause for the mysterious reboot. This is 2 from a batch of 3 Western Digital 500GB drives that have failed inside a month - any bets on the last one going soon?

1 hour later with drive removed, tested - its a physical failure and the main system disk had a scan on it and I am booting back up (for the 3rd or 4th time). Now the next thing I notice is that Outlook wont startup. It will start in safe mode however, and tells me that it has disabled a plugin for an application I uninstalled several months ago. Weird. However I have no time left to trouble shoot so we are running in safe mode.

Wife has been sent to store for replacement drive - oh yes - even more annoying, on the drive were my virtual machine images used for development and testing - now I need to build a new virtual machine and install XP and Office 2003. There's another hour of wasted time.

At least I feel better for having a whinge about it!

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Matt's picture

Ah fun stuff, I've never

Ah fun stuff, I've never trusted Western Digital drives, they always seem to die much sooner than Samsung and especially Seagate.

Interestingly enough, Vista did something very similar to me a couple of nights ago as well, except I could find no cause for it at all. All of my drives were working fine, it had just rebooted itself during the night and things wouldn't run properly (slow and chuggy). I rebooted it a couple of times with the same problem, booted into safe mode and things seemed normal. Rebooted normally and then it was fine. I really don't get it at all.

Navin's picture

A couple of suggestion

A couple of suggestion sir:

*make regular backup on DVDs or BLU-RAY if you can afford

*you can also make Image of your entire partition(which is just usuable to you system or similar configuration). I think norton ghost is good at it.

*and never ever invest on huge drives. I'd go for smaller drives umm.. may be 250GB each.. how's that? You can even put it on RAID if you know how to. Google will tell you how.. by the way.. That's even safer

*and don't give your harddrive to repair center at any cost. smash it, burn it whatever it takes, destroy it. If it's against their policy to get replacement, make sure, they've no access to your data. Because, more than 70% issues with the failing hard drives is fried up Logic board. You replace it, hard drive works like a charm. But logic boards are not sold separately, so, it's like taking kidney of one healthy person and putting it onto ailings one. People usually buy new drive to the cost of repair and replacing that board.

Last word: BACKUP Regularly!!!(that doesn't mean every minute) :)

btw, one more last words:" you have very nice blog about web " keep the good work sir!!!

jethro's picture

Thanks Navin we backup our

Thanks Navin
we backup our network each night, and also local pc is backed up as well to external drives - far better then dvd or blu ray for size - but your idea is good for small users.
we use acronis for disk imaging - its very good - funny thing was the hard drive that crashed had the acronis images on it - it wasn't a system drive.
it was actually a physical crash too - hard drive was going clunk clunk on spin up

thanks for the comments!