# W10 crash



## chandler48 (Jun 5, 2017)

You just never realize how much you can rely on your laptop computer until you hear your hard drive begin to click abnormally, then freeze. I had no control with keyboard nor mouse. Shut it down with power button. Funeral announcements later. 

Upon rebooting the only message it gave was no operating system installed. Inserted W10 install disk and tried repair. It said no drive existed. It is beyond my humble expertise, so off to the computer shop for data recovery.

I just feel useless since all my business, emails from customers, everything was on it. I back up the business regularly, and clone the computer on a WD external drive every few months. Just a real pita.

Having a ball on my ad riddled i pad until it gets fixed


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## Bud9051 (Nov 11, 2015)

I'll be interested in hearing what your backup procedures are after you get back up and running. My company from back in the XT age was involved in the disaster recovery process for a large company with as many as 60 satellite locations. The challenge we gave each manager was, if you arrived tomorrow for work and this branch was gone, nothing left, how long would it take to get your business back up and running. In some cases the answer was NEVER. When a computer become that critical to one's business some detailed procedures to backup software and locate spare equipment are necessary.

Glad you are still with us.

Bud


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## chandler48 (Jun 5, 2017)

Hey, Bud. I can assure you I will have much more stringent back up when it is up and running. Will probably buy new computer and not omly back up to thumb drive and WD more regularly, but will dupe everything on my desktop, too.


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## supers05 (May 23, 2015)

Story sucks, and I feel your pain, but I'm glad you have backups. 

You have the "click of death." It's basically unrecoverable without opening up the hard drive, and that isn't cheap. Most local stores won't have the equipment needed and you'll have to send it out. With your backups available, I'd say it's probably not worth it. 

This is a great example of how a backup regimen is so important. I've had people ask me to recover from worse, and they had stuff like immigration, or important legal documents without backups. I truly felt their pain, but there was nothing I could do at the time. (The only serious data recovery place in the city had left at the time. The only option was to send it out internationally. Not sure if there's a new place now. I haven't kept up.) 

PS. You'll want to backup to more then one device, and test them. If it's really important stuff, keep an extra regularly updated copy off-site. (ie. Your house, or some cloud backup service.) 

Cheers!


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## stick\shift (Mar 23, 2015)

Just as important as backing is testing the system: I had a job where we backed up to a tape drive every night and then a separate accounting backup once a month. Imagine our surprise when we tried to recover from a glitch to find that all of our tapes were blank....


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## Bud9051 (Nov 11, 2015)

The old system we worked on was so unreliable that you couldn't be sure the backup would work. Bottom line was, when your primary fails you no longer have a backup. Any failure during the recovery/restore process and what you thought was a backup could be gone, think disk drives stuffed with dust. It seems to become ridiculous to have 2 or more methods of backup but the pain of losing everything far exceeds the cost of multiple backup plans.

She kept asking, but how do I get to my saved files? No matter how we explained that her hard drive was destroyed on the inside she would wait a few minutes and repeat the question. She had no backups at all and used her computer extensively. Oh the pain.

Bud


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## Colbyt (Jan 27, 2014)

Drop an SSD in there, boot and hope you can restore from backups.


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## chandler48 (Jun 5, 2017)

Colbyt, that may be a good option. The laptops I have been looking at have SSD's, and I like the technology. Tech lady said it may be either fixed today, or the data recovered to my WD, so we'll see . It seems like every time I make a little bonus money, there's some Pac Man out there ready to gobble it up. Broken tooth, computer, truck, septic drain field, ......


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## Bud9051 (Nov 11, 2015)

LOL, when doing family or business budgets there is always that line to figure in the unexpected and dang it is hard to put enough money in there to cover all of those unknowns. And as I get older along with everything I own, still bigger.

Good luck on the recovery.

Bud


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## Drachenfire (Jun 6, 2017)

stick\shift said:


> Just as important as backing is testing the system: I had a job where we backed up to a tape drive every night and then a separate accounting backup once a month. Imagine our surprise when we tried to recover from a glitch to find that all of our tapes were blank....


This is a common mistake people make, the old set it and forget it syndrome.

They setup a backup device and then never think about it again until they really need it.

Backups should be tested at least monthly. This can be done by simply restoring a random sampling of files.


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## Colbyt (Jan 27, 2014)

chandler48 said:


> Colbyt, that may be a good option. The laptops I have been looking at have SSD's, and I like the technology. Tech lady said it may be either fixed today, or the data recovered to my WD, so we'll see . It seems like every time I make a little bonus money, there's some Pac Man out there ready to gobble it up. Broken tooth, computer, truck, septic drain field, ......





I just did my first one in wife's old and slow computer. You can get 120GB for as little as $20 on Amazon; not the best or fastest but better, much better than the 5400rpm hard drive it replaced.


It should be as easy as plugging in a lamp.


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## supers05 (May 23, 2015)

My plan is easy. I don't backup most of my stuff. When it's gone, it was time for spring cleaning anyways. 

Cheers!


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## chandler48 (Jun 5, 2017)

One day service from the computer store. Hard Drive was toast and all data was unrecoverable. They installed a 240 GB SSD and dumped my WD onto it and installed W10 pro. I probably didn't lose a bunch of absolutely necessary data, since I have Quickbooks backed up every other day, and all my pix were on WD. I can reconstruct the rest, and as supers05 said, I just got house cleaned.

HD is much faster and large enough. Total cost of diagnosis, SSD, and installation of data was $125. Very pleased.


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## supers05 (May 23, 2015)

chandler48 said:


> Total cost of diagnosis, SSD, and installation of data was $125. Very pleased.


That's including buying the ssd? These guys need a medal. 


Cheers!


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## Let it Snow (Feb 23, 2019)

About a year ago, I moved all files to iCoud, I use Macs. I save to the Cloud from several computers. I can open every file from my desktop, laptop and iPhone. I can also access them from any other computer by simply signing in to the Cloud. 
You may want to look into Cloud services for Windows.


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## Colbyt (Jan 27, 2014)

Google will give you 15GB of cloud storage for free. 



I think pictures taken with an Android device don't count in the total GB.


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## chandler48 (Jun 5, 2017)

Clouds are pretty, but secure??? Too many breaches and clouds are prime targets for data gleaning. This site, although the company is in the cloud business, states there are still quite a worry factor for bad things to happen, at an astronomical cost to end users. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com...aches-data-loss-outages-the-bad-side-of-cloud

I agree with the convenience, but even this local loss for me tells me I certainly don't want to store anything where I can't touch it, and can't do anything about it.

Supers05, that is what I thought, too. Yeah $59 for the SSD and $66 for their labor. They had a 1Tb hard drive for about twice as much, but I'll never use that much memory, and the 240 is 100 times what I had to begin with


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## That Guy (Aug 19, 2017)

I have the drives, ill be picking up one of these in the next 30 days to replace my hodge podge of backup via externals... I figure once I get this, Ill be able to free up over 20TB of space =)

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod...ynology&cm_re=synology-_-22-108-682-_-Product


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## That Guy (Aug 19, 2017)

Installing a hard drive is stupid easy. you have 2 plugs, they can only plug in 1 way, and each one can only go into the correct spot (their sizes are different to such a degree, youd have to be a complete retard to screw it up)


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## supers05 (May 23, 2015)

That Guy said:


> Installing a hard drive is stupid easy. you have 2 plugs, they can only plug in 1 way, and each one can only go into the correct spot (their sizes are different to such a degree, youd have to be a complete retard to screw it up)


Don't forget the static protection. Then installing and setting up windows. 

Some people are more comfortable with even basic things with electronics like this. They are just as uncomfortable with installing windows, even if some of us think it's easy. 

Cheers!


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