The Blog of Harald

The drive in Michaéla’s laptop finally failed last Tuesday (it’s been complaining ever since she accidentally dropped it off the waterbed last summer :). Since everything important was backed up or stored on the server, we were not to worried about replacing it. Still, being without a laptop for almost a week was making her a bit snaky :).

I purchased a replacement drive, attached it to a USB drive adapter (that I bought from NCIX a while back), and used a Linux rescue disk to clone the drive. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t boot! After Googling I learned that this is a common problem with Windows system partitions. I went to plan B; I started a Windows XP install on the new drive, allowing it to create the new partition and install the boot blocks. I mounted the old drive in another system (using a 2.5″ to 3.5″ drive adapter I had lying around). CHKDSK reported that the only bad blocks on the drive were in the free space and bitmap areas (lucky lucky), so I was able to use the Windows Backup utility to backup the data. I then mounted the new drive and restored it. After installing the new drive back into the laptop, it booted right away.

Of course, the kids were grumpy. With the two drive failures, I was using three of the four computers around here for repairs, so they couldn’t play computer games :). Conveniently, I finished right around bedtime…