Some more notes regarding a disk failure yesterday.

On Sept. 1 I tried to image my W2K machine. It failed, twice, in the same place (making 4 coasters). According to the PowerQuest site the error message indicated a problem reading from the hard disk. I ran W2K's CHKDSK /F - no errors found. Ran its equivalent of ScanDisk w/surface scan - no problems found. Nothing in Event Viewer.

Over the next few days I made regular complete system backups to a network drive using W2K Backup, which worked fine.

Yesterday evening (Sept. 4) the drive indicated a SMART failure ("drive failure imminent"). I first noticed this when the machine slowed down drastically. This SMART error was logged in the Event Viewer. I manually copied stuff that had changed (e-mail, VFP dev folders etc.) to a network drive. I then ran another complete W2K Backup to the network drive - it completed (and verified) fine but took 7.5 hours instead of a normal 1.5 hours.

After that I restarted with PQDI and tried imaging. Two attempts failed with hard disk read errors so unhappily I couldn't get an up-to-the-minute image.

At this point I was getting a SMART failure warning from the system BIOS at boot so the drive was definitely toast (too bad - IBM DeskStar DTLA 307045, 46GB IDE, one of the best IDE drives available. Only 6 months old.) Got a replacement from the white box vendor - had to settle for a Fujitsu 7200rpm 40GB but it's nearly as good.

Since I didn't have a recent image I had to reinstall from scratch then restore from W2K Backup. This was uneventful:

- Boot from W2KPro CD and install
- Update to W2K SP2 to get latest bug-fixed NTBACKUP.EXE
- Restored from backup file on network drive

I was warned twice to insert the original W2K CD to preserve "critical system files". I was able to cancel both times and let the restore process overwrite those files with "unknown versions".

The restore was not as exact as I would have liked. I had to reinstall the video driver, Promise ATA100 driver, and Intellipoint 3.2 for the MS Optical Wheelmouse. Because W2K reinstalled at 640x480 my desktop icons got rearranged. Some Web site cookies appear to have been lost or corrupted as well.

Bottom line: to get my system back took 2 hours 45 minutes from the time the drive was installed. I had to hack around with a few drivers and settings.

If I had had an image I would have been up in about 45 minutes, including restoration of e-mail, VFP dev folders etc. Restoring the image is a no-brainer, boot-from-floppy-then-feed-it-CDs process and you get back the EXACT system state at the time of the image.

It's worth noting that the first indication of a drive problem (albeit indirectly) was from PQDI. Its packet writing utility for writing to CD-Rs is probably fairly intolerant of HD soft read errors, so it's acting as a sort of early warning of drive failure.