Computer Down and Out

[kevin_standlee]

Although the computer came up one more time as I wrote last night, and while I got as much of my settings off of it as I could, it was the last straw. The next reboot wouldn't boot, and my attempts at fixing it totally hosed it. It won't even boot into the recovery partition now. It's utterly hosed, and thanks to the encryption software, it's effectively bricked as a hard drive. We'll have to reimage it and start over next week. I hope I can manage with my personal machine for the next few days and that I haven't managed to lose anything irreplaceable.

Comments

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Probably. They do say they may be able to decrypt the drive if I haven't ruined it sufficiently, which may give me a chance to get all of my files off of it. Ideally, once they do that, I'll put the spare 1TB drive into the machine (we bought it when we though we could do drive cloning, which we cannot do because of the encryption), they'll re-image to that drive, and I can pull all of my documents off of the cannot-boot older drive. That would be helpful. In any event, I once again have to start picking my way through the process of rebuilding a computer and getting comfortable with it.

I do back up a lot of stuff, but it doesn't seem possible to back up everything, which was why cloning the drive periodically (I could set it to run overnight) was so useful.

[paradoox.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a gigantic PITA. I usually try to create a clone of all new machines and then yearly clones besides periodically copying all my working files to my home desktop and two home NAS boxes. My safe deposit box and office floor are both littered with cloned disks. I also have several spare D630s ready to take one of the cloned disks if necessary.

I"m assuming the cloning failure was really the encryption and not just something like using old cloning software that didn't understand WIndows7 and 4k block allignment (the program I used to clone XP which was probably a stripped down version of Acronis would not work for Win7 - I had to buy a new version).

Two ideas for the future -
(a) Can you run a periodic (weekly?) overnight backup to an external drive?
or
(b) I don't know exactly how the drive encryption works or what cloning software you are using, but I'm wondering if something like Acronis could be used to create a non-bootable drive image that you could still restore files from if necessary. (Acronis can both clone to a HW disk and create a compressed non-bootable drive image to external storage) It would take longer to extract things than (a) but might be faster than (a).

Good luck.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I suppose it could be an issue with not having the very latest version of DriveClone/Total Recovery Pro. When I get my computer restored, I'll buy a copy of the very latest version and see if somehow I can make it work.

I can do those periodic backups. It's remembering to do them (even on a USB 3 connection, it's an all-night job) that' s the problem. I do also have a bunch of cloned disks in a fire-safe box, and, like you, a pile of D630s just in case. OTOH, using D630s is tricky: your system partition needs to be no bigger than about 120 GB because of the 137 GB BIOS bug. (My current D630 on which I'm typing this has a relatively small system partition and two much larger data partitions.)

There are limits to how I can organize my work machine's drive; the company wants things done their way, not mine. For example, I really wanted a separate system partition, with several other partitions; the PC guy couldn't figure out how to do that within the system constraints under which he has to work. I'm lucky to have as many rights on my computer as I do.