Bad News

[N585AS 2]

Wow... that sucks Rich. Hopefully its not too stressful for you. Look forward to more of your work when you get everything set back up.Joshua Smith

[A320FAN 370]

No problem ! I can wait

[Jude Bradley 659]

Sorry about that! My relative had the same issue, luckily he had it backed up to a external hard drive, like I do.Get something like this: http://www.amazon.co...23399966&sr=8-11TB is MORE than enough for anyone.

Hallo Diego,By a coinsidence I added the exact drive to my wish-list.

[ChopperSteve 6]

Feel sorry for you as im enjoying your BBJ Paint..........goto love microsoft!

[Rusty10 5]

Hi

it would not go into windows just a black screen after the enitial starting windows screen, not bios not overclock even weirder is the bios is not seeing the hard drive but it's there otherwise I would not get options to restore the system and the repair menus by the way therestore in win 7

All may not be lost?My initial guess is that there are corrupt secors on the HDD, which may be affecting the boot.ini? If windows starts to boot then at least the bios points to the bootsector and then attempst to load the OS. If you have a W7 CD boot from that and try a repair? Failing that get someone to burn Hirens Boot CD as an iso, boot into that and there are several programs available to try and fix HDD & bootmgr, which HDD manufacturer do you have, as there are specific manufacturer programs designed to fix bad drives? Also how old is the hdd you may have a Warranty claim and the manufacturers support that goes with it?If I can help in anyway then pm me? As I am not a repainter nort have the skills to be then at least I can try and contribute to the wonderful FSX community

[vonmar 124]

Rich,Are you sure your HD is dead?Like, is it getting power?Did you check cables .. reseat them .. stuff like that?Maybe you got a virus?Did you try to reset the HD specs in BIOS?Is your CMOS clock correct?How old is your motherboard and its battery?Do you only have one HD?May want C = OS only on next setup and all programs and data ona second HD e.g. (just a thought ..that is what I do).I have a 2 PC home wireless network. I backup my PCs data drive to the network PC.

[Paul_Smith 92]

That is the worst case scenario. I installed everything on a SSD drive to help prevent this. I am wondering if I can copy my entire hard drive to a notebook and if the SSD crashes, I can just use the notebook?

An SSD drive makes no difference in this situation - they fail just like everything else. If anybody reading this wants to avoid Rich's misfortune's, simply buy a drive a little larger then your current primary drive. Go to the drive manufacturers site and download their diskwizard software and use it to transfer your disk. If your drive then goes bad, just change your boot loader to boot from the replacement drive with no re-installing required. The more often you do this, the less data you will loose when (not if, when!) you suffer a disk failure. I do it every three or four weeks or after I load something significant. This fixes the problem of having to re-install everything but is not a replacement for your normal data backup.

[Rieder 3]

I had a drive crap out on me a few years back in a similar way. I set it manually in the bios, putting in the heads/cylinders details etc and it worked perfectly for another couple of years after that. A friend took a drive to a massive techy place that he worked at, they install hardware for banks and institutions. None of them could get it to show the true size, which was double the reported size. I once more entered the details manually and it worked perfectly, one of the techies rang me to ask how I did it??? In both cases I tend to wonder if the chip that auto sets the drive set up details had blown, bad solder, dry joint or whatever.It may not be possible now, long time since I last felt the need to do it. It may not be the same problem. It may not work. You may never trust it again. But at the end of the day you lose 5 minutes from your life. All I can say is it worked twice when I used it and this is the way we always used to have to set them up so it was no problem. Even with that chip/board being faulty the rest worked perfectly in both cases for me/us. Good luck,Steve

[flygarn1 0]

All important (win etc.) on 2 HDD in RAID1 (fix HDD failure)!FSX and all other low security prog on single drive like SSD.Backup on HDD station with RAID1!

[paulyg123 135]

I have a bacu up question: I have a 500 GB notebook empty. Do most people copy the entire C: drive on to it, or just the downloads like PMDG737NGX, FSUIPC, FlyTampa etc ?For some reason, I don't think you can mirror the entire hard drive Windows 7 plus all the software, drivers etc and then just run FSX off the 500 GB drive. How do you guys back up your prized possession. And with the SSD am I much better protected against a crash than a 10000 RPM drive?

[TheDanger 182]

I have 2 60 gig SSD and 4 SATA 2 7200 500gb drives1st 60 gig SSD = 30gig partition with Win 7 and FSX, 30 gig partition with Win 72nd 60 gig SSD = FSX and all addons linked to 30 gig partition on 1st SSD1st SATA 500gig = all PC games linked to 30 gig partition on 1st SSD2/3/4 SATA 500gig = music, films, downloaded apps/addons and ghost imagesI have Norton Ghost installed on my games partition and I boot into this to backup the FS Win 7 partition and the FSX drive. Works a treat and never failed me yet, Any corrupt files etc or need to change HD and I just copy the image back onto the new drive.Saves hours of reinstalling everything and then tweaking etc

[MrSpeaker 122]

Thanks Guys, I have backup drive Ryan but that does not negate the fact that I have to reinstall everything again, had everything running perfect blam junk this has never happened to me before usually its something I did lol but this time I was just repainting shut it down for the night next morning it would not go into windows just a black screen after the enitial starting windows screen, not bios not overclock even weirder is the bios is not seeing the hard drive but it's there otherwise I would not get options to restore the system and the repair menus by the way therestore in win 7 su$#@$s piece of crap, never works, anyway copying my files over to external now thank god I have my guitar rig to go online, just bought megascenery earth all of california takes 2 days to download and as much to install it every file has to be installed 1 by 1 if I lost that I would have to find a new hobby lol 20 years never not been able to get the drive back oh well thats life in the big city.Have a 1tb external seagate also, with all my payware and downloads on it, good thing.

This happened to me a couple years ago, I would invest in some imaging software, I use Acroinis true image and will never have to worry about a re-install again, it does incremental backups everyday to a 3TB external, if I delete something, lose a hardrive or whatever a few clicks and I'm back in business.

[cloudfreak1 1]

what you need is PARAGON http://www.amazon.de/Paragon-Festplatten-Manager-2011-Suite/dp/B004L46NIE/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=ce-de&ie=UTF8&qid=1323456571&sr=1-1-catcorrregardsjürgen

[Turbine777 13]

I think the biggest problem some people may have as they think a back up drive is the solution. It's half of it, the other half is using it for actual backups. This means that on it has a "COPY" of what you want to back up. A 500 TB drive is useless as a backup drive if it craps out. A few years ago I took over as acting system administrator for a company in Kentucky. Their original SA didn't understand this concept which makes me wonder how he ever was in that position.Simmers I often see start out with a good back-up drive and later clean up their drives. They see that they can free up space and do so by removing the file that is backed up on their "Back-up" drive. This move now makes your backup the only source but people fail to see that, or remember. Therefor it is no longer a backup drive, and a backup drive means it has a copy which can be found elsewhere on your system.Another technique I often do is email files to myself on top of my other backups. So if I were to spend a day on a spreadsheet for example, or resume. It only takes a second to email it, then put that email in my backups folder in my email ;)

[dazz 69]

For what it's worth, this is what I do:1.- Keep System/Programs separated from Data, I have Win 7 and programs installed in the 300GB Vrap. Data (videos, pics, documents, installers...) in it's own separate drive.2.- A 1.5TB external drive for backups: once a week synchronize the Data to the external drive (Acronis 2012 has syncronization, but you can use Allway Sync which is free and does the job).This means that you just tell the application what's the source partitition, the destination partition, and it will scan the drives so that the destination partition is updated with the new data.3.- Back up the System/Programs partition(s) with an imaging tool. You can't just copy-paste your C partition to have Windows and programs backed up, you need to clone the drive(s)/partition(s)I use Acronis, but Win 7 has a built in imaging feature, both allow to recover the system even if you can't boot into Windows, which is a key factor. You can burn a live CD with Acronis that will let you recover your system even if Windows is totally screwed up and simply won't boot. Having system and data in separate partitions, the system backups are much much smaller and take just a few minutes to perform and recover.Acronis is not free, but Clonezilla is a fine open source alternative and includes live CD/USB.You can of course have a backup drive for the backups, so you have extra redundancy in case your external HDD craps out, if it happens you'll need to get a new one anyway, so it's not a bad idea