I Had To Wipe Out My Hard Drive Today :(

The hard drive in my wife's laptop just croaked this morning, too. Based on everything I've tried to recover, I think the drive is physically dead. I have a six week old backup of it, which is better than nothing, but still... (sigh)

I'm torn - as someone who has suffered crashes, I can sympathize. As a freelance PC tech, all I can see in your posts are dollar signs. :)

I tentatively and cautiously suggest that if one wants to avoid problems such as this, one might get a Mac. No crashes, no viruses.

quote:

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Originally posted by Gary Burke

So far so good for me.

About a year ago, my brother and nephew build me a PC, and it has been perfect. My brother teaches computer science, and my nephew works with the school district, fixing computers.

I also have a Mac, which I use for my newspaper writing.

I only had a crash once, and that was when my son-in-law tried to up-date my system, not realizing that it would erase the hard drive.

By the way, I would appreciate any adise. I just leave my computer running unless I plan on being gone for several days. Is that what I should do? Or, should I turn it off every night?

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The only components in your computer which are at greater risk while it's running are the harddrive and fans (both have bearings). It's been my experience that 98% of all hardware problems are actually software problems, and the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) ratings for harddrives are astronomical these days. Having said that, I only advise people to leave their computers on 24/7 under the following conditions:

1) Acceptable protection from Internet intrusion through a firewall.

2) Automatic shutdown software to compensate for fan failure and the accompanying potential overheat destruction.

3) Have the harddrive(s) spool down after a given period of inactivity so you don't waste bearing life.

4) Optional: If it's going to be on anyways, download and run a Distributed Computing project of your choice.

Welcome to club. I have gone through 2 PC's in the last 4 years. Just take the tower and throw it as far as you can, that works for me. Now I have a Vaio laptop, been good so far. Ya think we are dependent on these things?


Tony ^_^

I run my desktop computer 24/7. Donated about 10,000 CPU hours to SETI now I'm donating to Folding@Home. Have both hardware and software firewalls. Been doing this for about 4 or 5 years, only problems I had were with power supply units failing a couple times. I own a UPS and that's basically it.

I keep an updated image of my whole disk, so rebuilding from a crash is a snap. For $49 bucks I do advise buying Acronis True Image. It will keep a backup of the whole disk, so it's easy to recover from a catrastophic failure.

SuperDave:

Thanks for the information!

ageka, your friend's advice is sound and technically accurate. Very few harddrive failures happen suddenly during operation - you boot up one morning and discover that Windows won't load. When you consider that hard drives run between 7200-15000 rpm's, you can imagine the kind of stresses which the moving parts face. Then again, startup failure is characteristic of almost all hardware failures, save those related to heat buildup.

There's a lot of great advice in this thread. I find it encouraging that I can join a totally non-computer-related forum and find so many savvy members.