HS Hard drive dead

[fungun]

Well i found out the hard way that the "freezer" trick I read on here actually works.
I even had enough time to get all my files off the HD and make a rescue disk and a image of my HD.
I shut done the HS PC for the electrician to do some work.
When he was done , I went to boot it back up and it was dead.


Question-When I get my new HD, how do i go about installing everything again?
1. I have the rescue disk and disk image of my old HD, so do I just run it?
2. I have a restore disk for this PC, do I run that first and then mount the backed up image?

Thanks,
Tim

ps When you do the freezer trick, as soon as you plug it into the PC, wrap a big bath towel around it.

[rprade]

Well i found out the hard way that the "freezer" trick I read on here actually works.
I even had enough time to get all my files off the HD and make a rescue disk and a image of my HD.
I shut done the HS PC for the electrician to do some work.
When he was done , I went to boot it back up and it was dead.


Question-When I get my new HD, how do i go about installing everything again?
1. I have the rescue disk and disk image of my old HD, so do I just run it?
2. I have a restore disk for this PC, do I run that first and then mount the backed up image?

Thanks,
Tim

ps When you do the freezer trick, as soon as you plug it into the PC, wrap a big bath towel around it.

If you have an image, you should be able to restore the new hard drive with the image directly. Did you use Windows or 3rd party SW to make the image? If it is Windows, usually the third choice on this page is the best, as long as you have a bootable Windows distribution CD or rescue disc. Either one will get you to recovery options, click Use a system image you created earlier to recover your computer.

[fungun]

I used Macrium Reflect.

Thank you,
Tim

[Pete]

Yup; that freezer trick has worked a few times for me in the last few years. (it was a bit low on the WAF using the freezer though).

Many times with the older drives the multiple RW heads over the stack HD platters just drop and quit working. You can hear them clicking when this has happened.

There are plenty of free to use wintel utilities out there in internetlandia. That said the issue relating to the imaging was that of imaging in vivo while running the OS. Easier to image a drive / recover a drive not being used in vivo in Wintel mode. Similiar utilities have always been around in Linux and typically is just built in to the standard releases of Ubuntu.

Over the years with Homeseer 2 here went to smaller hot swap paired raid one notebook drives keeping the primary partition of the Wintel server for Homeseer to 20 Gb. The smallest drives I could find were 120/160 Gb. It was mostly because it was easier and faster to image one 20Gb partition rather than 500 Mb / 1 plus Gb drives. That and keeping and running only Homeseer 2 on the dedicated Homeseer 2 server (well it was sort of headless in a rack)

On an unrelated / related note.
Here been using that SD card thing for the RPi2 stuff. Initially started at 4Gb then 8Gb and finally settled on 16Gb (which is probably too big). I have had one issue with a new faster SD card. I would write the image to the card and it would get trashed running only a couple of days. Rather than play with it just got a new one which was good customer service. Yesterday on a lark of wanting to re purpose a first generation RPi for Kodi (bird watching TV now) took the trashed SD card and did a low level format to it. The low level format worked (well 24 hours so far). I am putting this little RPi behind the kitchen nook LCD TV (in the in wall box) for my bird's entertainment. Mostly she likes cartoons and animal planet stuff. She does have a sleeping "blanket" of sorts that I put in her cage early evening and remote it before bedtime. She appears to be curling around the little blanket and gets mesmerized at night with it. (during the day without the blanket).