Failing hard drive, need quick recover

playah

playah

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Sep 29, 2006
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A friend of mine has a Toshiba Satellite purchased last April, he's a truck diver on the road and the hard drive is failing, he needs to get it back up asap.

Pretty sure it's running Vista and has no recovery cd's, what are possible solutions
 
Buy a replacement hard drive of his choice and a usb 2.5 drive enclosure. I'd suggest a WD drive personally. A black series if he is staying plugged in inside the truck. Maybe a good time to buy an SSD?

Use drive imaging software of choice to clone old drive to new drive. (most of the drive makers offer this for free if cloning to one of their drives if you don't have access to Acronis or similar)

Install new drive into laptop.

Use old drive for target practice. (If laptop is still in warranty maybe aproach Toshiba about a drive only warranty replacement. They will likely want to him to send entire notebook though.)
 
That's about what I told him, he's already got another drive and an enclosure, so I found best buy and office max had acronis.

We were thinking the same thing about warranty, they'd want him to send it in.
 
Best thing to do is clone it right away with Linux DD command, An imaging program like Acronis or Norton Ghost. If you need to recover data, use GetDataBack for windows, I will swear by that program with several years of experience. As long as you can access the drive you are golden.
 
SomethingInteresting said:
Return Acronis and use Clonezilla? XD

Really though, I haven't had any problems with Clonezilla yet.
Click to expand...


Looking at the limitations of Clonezilla, I see it says 'The partition to be imaged or cloned has to be unmounted."

Not sure what that means, the target is C: drive

I like free though
 
ProfessorKaos64 said:
Best thing to do is clone it right away with Linux DD command, An imaging program like Acronis or Norton Ghost. If you need to recover data, use GetDataBack for windows, I will swear by that program with several years of experience. As long as you can access the drive you are golden.
Click to expand...

no offense to his friend; but you try explaining the dd command to a truck driver.
 
Obviously Playa would be dong the work NOT the truck driver, or did you just want to try and make fun of me :D I'm just telling him the options. That's why I also listed easy options like getdataback
 
ProfessorKaos64 said:
Obviously Playa would be dong the work NOT the truck driver, or did you just want to try and make fun of me :D I'm just telling him the options. That's why I also listed easy options like getdataback
Click to expand...

No, not at all. Part of my duties for the last eight years was phone support and I learned that certain people shouldn't do certain things.
I didn't realize the "client" would not be the one doing the procedure.
 
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