Harddisk crash - lessons learned

11 days ago my boot hard disk crashed during some Norton Antivirus scanning in Windows XP. My desktop PC is a Fujitsu-Siemens Computer Scaleo T A64 XP 50 AM2 0 2,0GB bougth in 2006. I had Windows XP installed on the original Sigate 320GByte disk that contained also all my data (as I wanted to use the same files from both Windows and Ubuntu and Windows can't write on the Ubuntu file system but Ubuntu can write on the Windows NFTS format). In addition I had installed a 400 GByte harddisk with a backup partition and my Ubuntu installation. The bios couldn't find the Sigate disk any longer and as this disk contained the boot loader - neither the Windows XP nor my Ubuntu 7.10 did start. An clicking noice confirmed that there was a serios problem with the Sigate disk.

What to do? As I have a three-year service contract from Fujitsu-Siemens I first contacted the Fujitsu-Siemens service via the service phone I found under http://www.fujitsu-siemens.com. They aggreed to send somebody to change the harddisk. I asked wether they would also help to recover the data from the old disk. But - as this actually wasn't part of the service contract - they couln't provide this. Instead they said, that I would need to find a data recovery specialist by myself, if I would want that service. I found some companies providing this service but I soon decided that I wouldn't use this service for two reasons:

1. Furtunately I had my important data regularly mirrored from my Macboook to my Ubuntu machine via the Rsync script described in my previous post. In addition I had used Norton Save & Restore to make complete backups of my Windows partition on the second harddisk and even additional backups of some files and folders to an external USB disk. So actually only some files of my wife and some pictures seem to be lost (as the last complete backup from Norton Save & Restore was from 28th of December 2007 - obviously I wasn't using Windows very often so the nightly scheduled backup didn't run in the last months).
   
2. The offers I have received from data recovering specialist had been at approx. 900 EUR or more - what seem to me too much for a view pictures and open office documents.

Therefore I let the guy from Fujitsu-Siemens service contractor exchange my harddisk. As I now thougth recovering the Windows partition via Norton Safe & Restore would be easy - I let him go as I also had to go to work (otherwise he would have started restoring Windows via the Windows OEM recovery CD/DVD). That was two days ago. On the evening of the same day I booted from the Norton Safe & Restore CD. I was able to locate the recovery points from my backup partition and started restoring the complete harddisk ... at least that was what should now have happened. I expected that a process bar would appear showing me the slow progress of the recovery process. But nothing happened. No message, no signs indicating change, even no harddisk activity was to hear. After some minutes waiting I decided that someting must have gone wrong. I did the procedure again to make sure that I didn't do anything wrong but again no success. Than I thougth that maybe Norton Safe & Restore couldn't restore the Windows partition on a new unformated harddisk (whether this is true or not I am still not sure). Therefore I thought to give the Windows OEM recovery CD/DVD a try. After booting from this CD everything seem to work out well. After some clicks the formating of the new Sigate HD started. After approx. 1 hour formatting was finished and the procedure continued with installing Windows. After some minutes a message appeared that the recovery process would have now need to reboot. I thought - that's it recovery done, at least Windows would boot again. But instead of this booting again wasn't successful and stopped. OK - I thought than lets try again with the Windows recovery disks - this time the CD found the Sigate HD already formated so it started with installing Windows, but after some minutes - again the same message anouncing the rebooting. This time I left the recovery CD/DVD in the DVD drive. Obviously this didn't help. Rebooting started the Windows recovery CD/DVD in the same mode as before (i.e. formatting the Sigate HD --> Start to install Windows --> Reboot). No success. Back to Norton Safe & Restore - I thought at least now the Sigate HD should be preformated therefore now the restoring of my Windows partition should work. It didn't. In the last two days I have spend at least 10 hours trying these two procedure again and again thinking maybe I missed something. Unbelivable but true, nothing did work. For what ever reason neither the Fujitsu-Siemens recovery CD/DVD was able to do its only purpose - to restore this PC in its original condition nor the Norton Software was able to perform the very purpose I bougth it before - to recover my disk from a backup image. The only thing Norton Save and Restore was doing well was restoring some files and folders that was part of the backup on the external HD using another Windows XP PC (even that took much longer as I thought because the bad description of this function in the Norton user manual so that I had to use Google to find some hints how to do this). And for that purpose I could have used any freeware tool that would dump some compressed files on an USB disk.

Anyway after that more than 10 hours unsuccessful tries to recover my Windows partition with no progress at all, I decided to give it up. Instead - as I still plan to use my PC - I burned the latest Ubuntu (8.04 LTS) image on CD-R from http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download on my Macbook. Back on my Fujitsu-Siemens PC, I booted from this Live-CD and choosed to install Ubuntu on my new Sigate HD. After some clicks and answering some simple questions (such as time zone, keyboard layout, etc.) my Desktop PC was working again :-)). I was even able to boot again Ubuntu 7.10 that was still available on my other HD. In the next days I will have to:

• configure my Ubuntu machine in the way that all hardware (printer, scanner, etc.) and all software that I need will be installed and configured correctly.
• start synchronizing important documents again with my Macbook
  
• recover as much as possible data from the backup I made with Norton Safe & Restore although I now know that this will be a painful, slow, manual process.

Some of this will be part of my next blog.

So what did I learn:

1. Don't trust OEM recovery disks from Windows Operating Systems. The only way - if I still would want or need - to install Windows again on my desktop would be to buy a new Windows version! This will definitely weaken my desire to buy any PC with pre-installed Windows software in the future.
   
2. Don't trust Norton Safe & Restore. I am extremly disappointed from the usability, documentation, online help and functionality of that software. Probably, I will never again spend money for any software from Symantec. If I choose to backup Windows again (e.g. for laptop my daugther is still using)
3. Don't rely on only one form of backup. It might fail and than everything might be lost or recovery is much more expensive than buying several additional backup disk. Therefore I probably will start to use some Mac OS backup software such as SuperDuper to create fully bootable backups of my Macbook to an external USB disk besides reactivating my rsync script to synchronized important data between my Macbook and my Ubuntu machine. Furthermore, I will search for some backup solution for my Ubuntu machine as well as for the Windows XP laptop my daugther is using (probably involving at least backups of important folders - maybe even complete images - on an external USB drive. Furthermore, I plan to continue using online storage places such as Gmail (for my mails), GoogleDocs (for some important office documents), Picasa (for pictures) and of course Blogger. As I still have an web.de club account that includes some online-storage place that is accessable via WebDav protocoll I am thinking, if this could be used as well for backing up some important data (e.g. by some rsync script).
   
4. The new Ubuntu 8.04 LTE is easy to install and gives a very good first impression. I was positive surprised that the screen resolution was automatically set correctly (1440 x 900), which is a big improvement compared to the two previous Ubuntu versions.