Confessions of a Six Figure Professional Blogger

Hard Drive Failure, Vista, and My Middle Finger

June 8, 2007 | Opinion

Sometimes living as an internet entreprenuer means you get bit in the ass by your own computer. That’s what happened to me yesterday and is the reason I was off the radar all day yesterday. It all started with my getting out of bed and my wife telling me that the power went out for about 40 minutes before I got up. She then says my office was beeping so she closed the door. Oh shit, I think. The beeping means that my UPS battery was dying and that, sure enough, my computer just died. No big deal, right? Wrong. I go to boot it back up and it locks up while I’m staring at the Windows boot-up logo. Try again. This time the hard drive is making a weird clanking noise and I get a read error on the disk. And once again, I think: Oh shit.

Hard Drive Failure

Yep, my hard drive croaked. Luckily I was using Norton Ghost on my machine and had everything backed up on the external hard drive. Right? Well, partly. As it turns out, Norton had not successfully backed up my computer for about two weeks. Which means I have lost about two weeks worth of work. Now, luckily, being in the business I am means much of my work is up on servers. So, I can go and download much of it. Unfortunately, I cannot recover the last two weeks worth of email. I also lost the last two weeks worth of statistics and accounting data, although I’m hoping I can get all that back together. It just means a bunch of repeated work and wasted time.

Replacing the hard drive was not exactly cake. I am using a pre-built Gateway machine. Its a nice box and a good value, however it came with an EIDE hard drive. Most of the drives sold today are SATA. Why Gateway used EIDE in a brand new computer is beyond me. Fortunately, the motherboard supported SATA, so I went out and picked up a couple new 320GB SATA drives. Why two? Because I intend to set up auto-backup again internally so that data is redundant. I get home and… oh, man! The power supply in the case does not have power leads for SATA drives. So, I hop BACK in the car and head out again to pick up some adapters to convert the standard Molex leads into SATA leads. Once I got those, I was able to begin setting up this computer with the new SATA drives. But, it doesn’t end there because of my new bright idea…

Windows Vista

I have been saying all along that I was not going to upgrade to Vista, but to get it on a new machine. Well, I kind of did that. :) I figured that since I was going to go to all this work, I might as well upgrade my operating system. I know I could have restored from the Ghost images, but I kind of wanted a fresh start to clean out some of the “gunk” left behind in XP. So, I decided to make a fresh start and install Vista while I’m at it. So, while I’m out buying the two hard drives, I pick up an upgrade disc to Vista Home Premium for a whopping 160 smackers.

First thing to know about a Vista upgrade is that you cannot do a fresh install from it. At least not directly. There is a way that you can install the trial version of Vista, then “upgrade” it to the registered Vista from within Vista. It’s a loophole, but apparently it works. In my case, I just installed a virgin copy of Windows XP, then upgraded it to Vista. Everything worked fine until I got to the point of dealing with my video drivers.

ATI and Nvidia Don’t Mix with Vista

I use three monitors on my computer. Pure geek heaven, I tell you. This Gateway came with an ATI video integrated onto the motherboard. To get the other two screens, I picked up an Nvidia GeForce 7300GS which has two video outs. Worked fine under XP. Under Vista it was a different beast. The built-in Windows drivers for the ATI rig worked fine after some adjustments. But, the Nvidia card refused to play nice. Rich (my video guy) and I were messing with the thing for probably two hours. Finally, what I discovered was that I could make the ATI card work great by itself. I could also make the Nvidia card power two screens by itself (after disabling the ATI card in the BIOS). But, I could NOT get both to run at the same time.

So, I know that the ATI one is built in. I only have one PCI-E slot on this motherboard. The Nvidia one won’t work. So, I’m left wondering if swapping out the Nvidia card for an ATI card would work. It would be all ATI – no mixing of chipsets. So, I go out for the THIRD time in one day and pick up a dual-head ATI card. Get home, pop it in, and it lit up right away without me even having to install the drivers from the CD. Now, I’m back up and running in full three screen glory under Windows Vista. ATI is obviously loving Vista.

Recovery

So, as I type this blog post, I am in the process of restoring my data files to a second PC here in the office that is still running XP. It’s taking forever, but when its done, I will get all my data moved back over to the Vista machine which I am using now.

Some may think I’m nuts for trying Vista on my primary work computer. But, aside from the video difficulties, so far it seems pretty nice. I like to think of myself as an early adopter, because generally I would recommend waiting at least a year before installing a new operating system. There are still a lot of people out there bashing Vista and giving the term “Microshit” a real meaning. However, so far Vista is running smooth. It’s early in the game, though.

Now, by the end of today, I should be back in full swing here at PC Media central. I can get back to business.

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  • David
    You might try checking out mozy.com, that service Jason recommended above. I signed up for the free 2 gig account and so far I'm liking it. I may very well sign up for the paid account so I can back up everything online.

    I must be a bit old-fashioned still, but I'm still a little hot and bothered about the idea of all my documents sitting up at Google.
  • Man, that sounds rough. I've been trying to do more and more of my work online using things like Google Docs for this reason, and backing up my media files to an external HD. I'd like to get those online too, but haven't found a reasonably priced service for my gigs yet.
  • David
    Thanks Jay. I will definitely check out Mozy.com. Looks pretty nice. Its one of those things that you take for granted until you get bit by it. I'm glad I was at least backing up with Ghost. I did lose a couple weeks worth of stuff, but that's a hell of a lot better than all of it. :)
  • Sorry to hear about your hassles.

    I've been using a service called Mozy.com to automatically back up at least the critical stuff on a daily basis. It uploads to a remote service. The really nice thing is it only backs up files (or even portions of files) that have changed.

    The first backup will take several hours or more to upload, but after that, other incremental backups go rather quickly.
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