Question my precious...

Really sorry to hear about that... systems dying, for whatever reason, are never fun... crossing my fingers that putting it back together and the reinstallation go smoothly and without any more surprises.

Ouch. Sorry to hear that. Time to learn to write on the phone.

Yikes, had a similar thing happen in November of 2014, whole system died and hard drive was irretrievable even when an expert froze it and tested it again. Plus goofed and didn't backup anything on that hard drive, learned that lesson the hard way. Hope everything goes well with your new computer.

can not recommend this any more than --DO IT!

it makes OS re installs so easy! all your wants in one place!

ninite.com/

Even if you lost your hard disk, it *should* be possible to reinstall your previous OS and activate it normally. And yes, that applies even if you never created your "recovery DVDs" as they told you to do, and therefore your only reinstall media was the failed HD itself. But it takes a little bit of work.

First, you have to determine which version of Windows you used to have. Then, you go to Microsoft's site and download an ISO for it. (If your previous OS was Windows 7, you will have to enter the product key from the OEM label -- usually on the bottom of laptops, or on the side of towers. Windows 8/8.1/10 does not require the product key).

Then you reinstall your computer... activate it... and perform an upgrade to Windows 10.

And then, if you wish, you reformat it and do a clean install of Win10.

But it requires a working computer to do all the downloads, and takes a few hours of work. If you are too busy, it might be worth to pay for the full license to avoid the hassle.

(In the old days, it used to be much more of a hassle... each OEM was responsible for activating the computers they sold, and they used different crypto keys, so a product key from Dell would work *only* with an installation disk from Dell. If the OEM went out of business, you were SOL. Worse, sometimes the setup disk was keyed in a way that you not only had to have the right brand, but the right disk for that specific product line to be able to install it at all. Fortunately, this is no longer common.)

Glad to hear it wasn't a disaster.

Kristin Darken wrote: It's possible that my last system is still functional, if I try pulling it out of the closet graveyard it is currently in, but that one is as old as the WU. And I don't think it can burn DVD's.

Actually, there's an option to generate a bootable USB drive directly (any 4Gb or bigger drive will do). Assuming, of course, that the USB ports on your old machine are functional...

Kristin Darken wrote: This system... is practical evidence for why I like to build my own from parts. I've had to do more repairs to it than any other system I ever owned. Its an iBuyPower model that I bought through Tiger Direct. I scrapped the liquid cooling system and put in a high end heat sink and quiet fan within the first six months because of heat issues. Then before the year was out, one of the crappy memory sticks went bad. I wanted to boost memory anyway, so it wasn't too frustrating, and now this.

Amen, sister. I built my current computer back in 2010. I has been running fine for six years. I recently decided to reformat it due to an obscure but annoying intermittent software issue (since it happened *only* during boot, id didn't really disturb my workflow -- once it was going, it worked for weeks on end). In the process, I pondered upgrading it a bit... was it worth to put money on a six-year-old machine? I considered that it is still running fine, it still has good performance running the apps I care about (I deal with a number of brand-new machines and I can't really tell the difference from my six-year-old one in day-to-day tasks)... so I added a SSD as a boot device and doubled the RAM. I'm thinking I may keep this machine for at least three more years.

But your original problem (hard disk failure)? Yeah, I have seen those. Way more than one would expect. I think those MTBF numbers are ridiculously inflated. In my personal experience, you will be pretty lucky if a consumer-grade hard disk lasts five years.

I don't know how important the stuff on your drive is/was to you, but a friend had their hard drive crash and it had a lot of unique and important files. She sent it to 300dollardatarecovery.com/ They recovered 99+% of the data and put it on a 1 TB drive for an additional $100. Total with shipping and everything was $420, and it took about 7-10 days.

with the price of a 1TB or 2TB USB drive (like a passbook or such) at Frys (last one I got was 1TB for $59 on sale), there's really not an excuse to NOT have a full disk backup. And with the ransomware malware out there, there's even MORE incentive.

Unless you have 8TB of installed disks full of digital media...

The problem with most, and I'm not saying all as I fall into this category at times, is our failure to make frequent backups of important data be it documents, digital media and so forth. We've become complacent in how we take for granted on that a piece of electronic gear until it fails.

I have a hard drive I just plug in (usb) when I'm wont and just need to back it up. I'm just as lazy as any for not being religious about it. Now they talk about the cloud (which I'm afraid I don't fully trust yet) as another method. Some are free while others cost.

I used to use Ghost (single user) to make a backup of my OS and such periodically to it now I can't even do that as its no longer available.

I use a Dropbox folder as my default working folder. Of course there's limited space, and it's more vulnerable there, but I don't do much to take up the space, and I'm not working on anything particularly private. And it guarantees that if my laptop exploded tomorrow, I wouldn't lose any of those documents. I would lose most of my pictures and miscellaneous other things that I don't keep there, though.

I have my computer configured to make incremental backups of my entire home directory to an external harddrive every night. Besides being useful in case the main drive fails or I delete/change something I regret, it also means that if there's ever a fire or emergency and I have to leave in a hurry, if I've got about four seconds to spare I could yank the cables out and take the drive with me. It's not all of my data, but it's all of the bits that would be painful to lose. I actually have it set so I have to specifically blacklist stuff I don't want, rather than the opposite. That way I don't have to worry about forgetting some random program's config data that it stores in some obscure location. (Mainly I'm excluding large data -- disk images, VMs, that kind of thing. Nothing I care about.)

And if I do have to evac without the disk, I still won't lose my bookmarks at least. Firefox has an optional feature to save your bookmarks to the cloud so it can sync them across multiple Firefox installs. That's a terrible idea if you're paranoid about bookmark privacy, but if like me you don't mind Mozilla and their friends potentially knowing which sites you have bookmarked, it's super convenient. (And for all I know, it may be actually secure. I don't actually care, so I never bothered checking if it encrypts the data client-side so that it's safe from their own people.)

Kettlekorn - That sounds as though you have your computer switched on continuously. Having regular back-ups during down time doesn't work if, like me, the computer is switched off when not in use.

When I bought my current computer I was having a major problem backing up files recovered from two defunct computers to an external USB drive via a very old laptop which was the only other working computer I had at the time. I finally traced the problem to a default setting on the new laptop that was so busy trying to save a fresh image of the whole 1TB hard drive every 4 hours to the same 3TB external drive to which I was trying to save around 2TB of files.

Needless to say the poor external drive was running continuously just trying to keep up with the flood of data that it was being asked to handle. Having found the problem I checked the drive capacity and found that there were already 2 copies of the new computer hard drive image and almost no room for the files I actually needed to save.

The biggest problem I have with automatic back-ups is that while the programme settings usually end up making multiple copies there is no instruction which limits the total number of copies. The programme will gaily continue to fill up the designated drive until there is no room left without removing the oldest of the copies. If I were to use such a programme the most I would expect to be stored would be the last 3 copies, which in itself can amount to a huge amount of disc space, but when I buy an external drive I don't do so intending to allow my computer to fill it with clones of itself. I buy the drive to store files that would otherwise overfill the computers hard drive!.

John.

That's simply not true. Good backup software will allow you to set up schedules for full, differential and incremental backups... and also for how long to keep the older sets.(*)

Systems like Apple's Time Machine and Genie Timeline also allow you to put an upper limit on the backups, although in their case it's usually expressed in terms of time instead of number of backups.

(*)Although the wildly popular freeware Cobian Backup is supposed to clean up old backups automatically, this particular feature is buggy and I have seen it fail, so you should still check it once in a while. Commercial software usually works.

rubberjohn wrote: Kettlekorn - That sounds as though you have your computer switched on continuously. Having regular back-ups during down time doesn't work if, like me, the computer is switched off when not in use.

Actually I shut it off every night. I made an alias for the poweroff command that first runs my backup process, then begins the poweroff process. That means that it takes longer to shut down than normal, but it doesn't matter since I'm already done for the night by that point. If I do want to shut down quickly, I use a different alias that skips the backup. Using reboot instead of poweroff also skips it.