Coventry Woods
Computer Tips
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Recovering from a computer disaster: Part I
Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7
By TC & EB of Cloudeight
Newsletter #342 May 7. 2010
(The tools you'll use are summarized in Part IV)
This is a true story; the names haven’t even been changed to protect the innocent or guilty.
The first thing you need to do is to get the thought out of your mind that something bad won’t happen to your computer. It’s easy when things are going well to forget that computers are subject to all sorts of maladies – just like we humans are.
I’m going to relate two experiences we had in the past week or so that we hope will be as good of lesson for you as it was for us.
First we’ll start with TC’s experience. On a Sunday morning, TC went to his computer to do some work and noticed that the hard drive was making clicking and clattering noises. The hard drive was several years old, and hard drives do fail. More often than not hard drives fail slowly. But if you start noticing that programs take longer to open, many programs give you the “not responding” dialog at first, then start working, and if your boot and shut down times are much longer than normal, a failing hard drive MAY be the cause. There are many other things that could result in the above symptoms, and a hard drive going bad is one of them. The clicking, clattering sounds coming from the computer’s main hard drive coupled with the symptoms described, made it a fairly easy diagnosis: hard drive failure was imminent.
As much as TC preaches in our newsletters about the importance of backing up – full image backups being the best of all possible backups – TC hadn’t been exactly practicing what he’d been preaching. So there he was on a Sunday morning, knowing his hard drive was failing and knowing he’d not created an image backup since November.
While he’d been backing up files using Oops! Backup, he’d not done a mirror image of his primary hard drive for over 5 months. Now faced with a looming computer disaster, it was time to make an image backup – and make it quickly.
We have been recommending a free backup program called Paragon Backup & Recovery. TC still had version 9 installed on his desktop, so the first thing he did was download version 10. After it was downloaded, and installed, the first thing he did is prepare a recovery CD. We’re not talking about the kind of recovery CD that sometimes come with new computers, we’re talking about one that lets you boot your computer and run tasks –like restoring a drive from a backup – or partitioning a hard drive. After he created the recover media, TC began backing up his main hard drive – the primary hard drive – and hoping the backup would complete before the hard drive failed completely.
This is a good time to point out that we probably store more data on our hard drives than the average person would: TC’s had 230 GB of data, programs, etc. to backup – and it takes a while to back that much data up. Since Paragon makes an exact clone of your hard drive, everything on your hard drive is copied – including your Windows installation.
It took nearly 2 hours to “image” TC’s hard drive – all the while he was hoping that the hard drive would keep spinning long enough for Paragon to clone it. Luck was with him that morning, because two hours later, Paragon reported that the disk had been successfully “imaged”. Paragon allows you to double-check the integrity of the backups it makes, so TC took the extra time to verify that that disk image Paragon created was viable. Again luck was with him, everything was backed up; TC had a perfect mirror image of his hard drive, now all he needed to do was buy a new hard drive and clone his old drive onto it.
Installing a new hard drive in computer that has been built within the last five years is really easy to do. With most brands of computers, these days, you don’t even need a screwdriver to open the case. Opening the case is easy, and installing a hard drive is just as easy. The most common hard drives are SATA hard drives, There’s only two cables connecting it to the computer, one is a power cable the only connects the hard drive to the main board – or “motherboard”. You simply slip out the old hard drive, and slip in the new one, hook up the two cables and installation is complete – sort of.
This is a good time to point out to those of you who have more than one hard drive, to make sure you know which drive you’re replacing. Paragon makes it simple for you to know that you’re replacing the correct drive. Paragon gives you the serial number of the drive you’re backing up. So if you’re replacing that drive, all you have to do is look for the drive that has that serial number and swap the new drive for the old drive. You don’t even have to know which cables go to which drive – there are only two cables on modern SATA drives – and unlike the older hard drives no jumper settings to mess with. Just make sure you check the serial number of your hard drive that Paragon gives you and swap it out for the new one. It won’t take you more than five minutes to install a new hard drive, it’s that simple.
Anyway, getting back to TC’s story; after he had created the recovery media and created a mirror-image of his hard drive, using Paragon, TC removed the clattering old hard drive from his computer, and replaced it with a brand new one.
Since we’re assuming most of you have never attempted replacing your primary hard drive, we want to point out two things:
1. You don’t need the disk that comes with your hard drive;
2. You don’t have anything on your new hard drive so you can’t boot your computer from it.
Most new hard drives come with a CD that allows you to boot your computer and format the new hard drive so it can be used. However TC wanted to use his image backup of his old hard drive and restore it to his new hard drive. He booted up by inserting the recovery media he had created using Paragon and began the process of restoring the image from an old hard drive on a new one.
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Recovering from a computer disaster: Part II
Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7
Restoring 200+ GB of data to a new hard drive isn’t a quick process. Paragon Backup & Recovery makes it as easy to recover from a computer disaster as a software program can make it – and to think that it’s totally free, is amazing. However, it took nearly 3.5 hours to put the image of the backup on the new hard drive – so you have to be prepared to spend some time in order to restore an image backup; the time it takes is directly related to how big your backup is and the speed of the device on which your backups reside. Paragon is as fast at restoring a drive as Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image – and Paragon is free – the others are not.
TC discovered some interesting features that Paragon has in the process of restoring his primary hard drive.
If you don't understand what hard drive partitions are, they are like partitions in a room. You can partition a large room into two or three rooms, but they're all part of the same large room. If you don't understand hard drive partitioning, don't let that bother you, Paragon will restore whatever is on your drive and any partitions you have. If you haven't partitioned your drive, that's fine, it will create an image of your hard drive exactly as it is.
If you do understand partitions, then this will make sense to you, and show you some additions features of Paragon Backup and Recovery. TC had his old primary hard drive partitioned into 2 drives, (drives “C” and “F” , drives “D” and “E” were pre-assigned to the DVD R/W and the CD/DVD drives). Paragon recognizes the partitioning and will restore the partitions exactly as they were on the old drive on the new drive. This is great; however, if the new drive is larger than the old drive, this will leave a lot of unallocated space, which will then have to be formatted and will then become another “logical” drive.
If you use the Quick Restore function, Paragon will simply clone your old hard drive onto the new one and if the new drive is bigger than the old one, any space not used will be “unallocated”. So, it’s best not to use the “Quick Restore” if you’re cloning a smaller hard drive on to a bigger one. TC chose Quick Restore, not realizing until it was too late that this option doesn’t allow for the partitions to be proportionately resized filling the entire bigger hard drive. It was OK in TC’s case, since another logical partition on the drive was desirable. (Later on EB purchased a bigger hard drive and used the full restore option and her hard drives were proportionately resized to fill the entire drive – see the screen shot below of Paragon’s interface and the view of EB’s new hard drive, freshly cloned from a Paragon backup. )
After TC’s restore was complete he attempted to reboot his computer – but the computer would not boot. It turns out that Paragon does what is says it does, it precisely clones the old hard drive – bad boot sectors and all.
Lesson learned: Make sure you have more than one backup. If your hard drive starts failing fast, and gets to the point where it starts making noises, then your computer probably won’t boot up the next time you restart it. In fact, this was the case with TC’s computer. Before he replaced the hard drive, the computer would not boot, there were so many errors on the failing hard drive.
But the hard drive was cloned perfectly – the operating system and all the programs were copied perfectly onto the new hard drive – including the bad boot sector. To get around this, TC booted the computer with the Windows Vista installation DVD and ran the “Repair” option. He had to run it three times before the boot problem was fixed but when it was fixed, he rebooted his computer, with the brand new hard drives – and everything was exactly like it was before disaster struck.
If you don’t think it can happen to you – it can. Hard drives don’t last forever, with heavy use you may only get 4 years out of your hard drive, five if you’re lucky. We’re heavy users and ours lasted about five years. If you’re a light to moderate computer user, you might get six or more years out of your hard drive – but sooner or later, if you keep your computer long enough, you’re going to have a hard drive failure, and when you do you’re going to be glad that you read this article – and kept image backups instead of piecemeal file backups.
Remember to keep more than one image backup, if your hard drive is failing fast, the last backup you make, may have a bad boot sector. You can recover from this but it’s a lot easier if you have a backup created before the boot sector became corrupt. You can simply restore from the image backup and reboot your computer – and your computer will be back exactly as it was before your computer problems began.
Keep in mind, a mirror image of your hard drive means exactly that. If your computer is running extremely poorly, and you create an image back up and you use that backup to restore you computer from, you’re going get exactly what you had – a poorly running computer. Make sure your computer is running well or at least satisfactory before you make an image backup. If it’s not, try using a service like Reimage to get your computer back to tip-top shape before making an image backup.
Image backups make recovering from a disaster as easy as it can be. You won’t lose anything – not those precious photos of your grand child, or those emails you’ve been saving, or your bookmarks/favorite, or your programs – and you won’t have to reinstall Windows.
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Recovering from a computer disaster: Part III
Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7
So why should you use a program like Paragon Backup and Recovery to create and store good image backups?
There is not a day that goes by that we don’t receive four or five emails from people who write and say “my hard drive crashed and I lost all my programs. Can you please provide me a replacement key for your _________ program? I bought it a couple of years ago.” Everyone has had or will have a computer "crash" some time. No matter how well-maintained your computer is, a major computer problem is going to happen. You can backup some of your files and save them on a USB flash drive, or second drive, or an external hard drive, but other than those files you saved, you're going to spend hours, days, or weeks, reinstalling Windows, getting it set up the way you like it, reinstalling programs, registering software, etc. And if you do it that way, you're going to have to find all your registration keys, software CDs, Windows CD, and many people just are not prepared.
Image backups create a mirror-image of your hard drive - which means what it says - an exact clone of your hard drive and everything on it, including Windows. Once you restore your computer from an image backup, you're done. Everything is back the way it was - Windows is already installed, all your software is installed, all your mail accounts and mail is there, everything is exactly the same as it was when you created the backup. We're going to keep reminding you what an image backup is and why it is the very best way to backup your computer.
Here are the essential reasons why you need to keep good image backups:
1. You don’t have to reinstall Windows or any of your programs; everything that is on your computer right now will be included in the image of your hard drive. You won’t have to write emails asking for registration keys, or setup your Windows preferences or do anything other than restore your computer from the image backup.
2. If your hard drive fails, you can buy a new hard drive and use your image backup to put everything on the new drive. After the restoration is complete and you reboot your computer, your computer will be exactly as it was before you had problems.
3. Image backups contain everything on your hard drive – including your email accounts, messages, settings, rules and address book. Your browser’s settings are restored and all your bookmarks will be restored.
4. It may take you several hours to create an image backup and/or to restore your hard drive from one, but it will take you days, weeks or even months if you have to reinstall Windows, reinstall all your programs, find the license keys for them, setup your email accounts, and reset all your Window preferences.
Everyone who has used Windows for very many years has had to reinstall Windows at least once. And if you’re one of those people, you are well aware that it isn’t much fun. Image backups make restoring you computer much easier and much quicker; and knowing that image backup is there if you need it, ready and waiting if disaster strikes, brings great peace of mind.
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Recovering from a computer disaster: Part IV
Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7
In this part we’re going to tell you what you will need to get started using image-based backups. Here are the tools of the trade:
2. An external USB hard drive or second internal hard drive.
3. A basic knowledge of Windows
4. A little time to spend
We’d strongly recommend that you purchase an external USB hard drive. They’ve become much cheaper than they used to be. For example, right now you can buy a one terabyte external hard drive for under $100. They are great for so many things, and they’re perfect for keeping image based backups. External hard drives today are large capacity; a one terabyte hard drive should be plenty for most of you, especially since Paragon compresses the image backups quite nicely. TC’s hard drive contained just over 230 GB of data; Paragon compressed 230 GB to 83 GB. With a one terabyte external drive you could store 11 full backups – and you never really to keep more than two; one you created when your computer was running well and your most recent backup. Two full image backups would take up just about 17% of your terabyte hard drive, leaving you plenty of room to store other files, such as music, photos, documents, etc.
You’ll need only a basic knowledge of Windows to use Paragon Backup and Recovery Free Edition. It couldn’t be much simpler, and you only need to look at its intuitive interface to figure the program out. We highly suggest, that you read the excellent manual (PDF format) that Paragon provides. The program does a lot more than just create mirror-image backups: you can partition hard drives, transfer files, and more.
You’ll need from one to three hours to create a mirror image backup depending on the size of your hard drive and the amount of data you have on it. That being said, you’re not tied to your computer during this process – once you get Paragon started, everything is automatic. The same is true when you use Paragon to restore a hard drive. Once the process is started, you can walk away and do whatever you like. When Paragon is done, it will display a message that the restoration completed successfully. All you have to do then is reboot your computer – and be amazed that everything is as it was before your computer problems began.
A little note from us: I successfully cloned my old, failing hard drive to a brand new hard drive and was singing the praises (again) of image-based backup to a skeptical EB. EB’s hard drive on her desktop is approaching five years old and she was noticing that it took nearly a minute for Windows Explorer to open; she was having problems with Outlook Express – compacting was causing a problem and she could no longer create new message rules. On Wednesday of this week, I finally convinced EB to take the plunge; she downloaded Paragon Backup & Recovery 10, created an image of her primary hard drive (the one with Windows on it – the “boot” drive), installed her new hard drive and proceeded to clone copied the image of her old hard drive on her new one. She was shocked when she rebooted and everything was exactly as it was. Not only was everything as it was, her computer ran almost like new – her old hard drive was starting to fail and everything was sluggish; programs took forever to open. Installing a new hard drive and using Paragon Backup and Recovery 10 to restore and image of her old hard drive to a new hard worked for me and for EB too. EB was skeptical and now she's a believer - in the value of image backups and in Paragon Backup & Recovery 10 free edition.
I had four words to say to EB: “I told you so.” Those are my favorite four words, by the way.
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Just a little aside here: We used to endorse and recommend Acronis True Image, which does the same thing as Paragon Back Up and Recovery does. We both have copies of Acronis, but chose to use Paragon Backup and Recovery free edition so we could tell you about our experiences. We have used Norton Ghost, Acronis True Image and now Paragon Backup and Recovery free edition. We could have made money by pushing you to Acronis, because it does work well, but so does Paragon. We're not claiming to be altruistic, but we feel it's our responsibility to find the best deals for you even if it costs us a chance to earn some money. Paragon works every bit as well as Acronis or Norton - the fact that I'm writing this newsletter on a computer with a brand new hard drive restored with an image from my old hard drive, is living proof. I didn't lose a single byte of information.
Reimage - Before you call a computer repair tech or spend several hundred dollars - consider Reimage! In an era when big companies like Best Buy's Geek Squad spend millions and millions of dollars extolling the virtues(?) of its sundry services, many folks with broken computers will simply pick up the phone and call Geek Squad or another heavily-advertised computer repair service. It's not until the repair is finished that the computer owner realizes how Geek Squad can afford all those cute(?) Volkswagens and that multi-gazillion-dollar ad budget. The shock is the bill - if you have your computer repaired in your home (in the USA) it will cost $299.95 - if you lug it into a Best Buy near you, you'll pay $199.95. And what do you get for that much money? If your computer isn't running well and is in need of repair, before you call someone else - get a Reimage free scan first, then decide if you want to buy it at US $47.95 to fix what is wrong. You will receive a key which is good for multi-repairs for one year. If you're not satisfied, they'll credit back a full refund to your credit card, rolling back any repairs that were made.
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This page was last updated: September 29, 2010
