A Chase to Backup!
Monday, March 12, 2012 | Author: Deep Flash
Today was one of my worst days. The reason being, my laptop's hard disk crashed in the morning. This may not sound like a major incident to most. But it can be, if that hard disk contains your research work of years, your precious data and lots of other stuff.

At first, it was hard to believe. Now that I have got some time to get myself back together, I am in a position to highlight the sequence of events:

1. Wake up at 8 AM in the morning.

2. Start my laptop. And while it boots, I continue with my other daily routine.

3. When I come back, I notice that the system restarted and I am presented with Windows Error Recovery Menu. It provides 2 options:
a) Startup Recovery Mode
b) Start Normally

4. At this point, I did not really take it seriously. So I decided to go for the 2nd option just to make sure if it was not a persistent issue. I also wanted to check that what exactly made the system restart on its own.

5. And there you go, right after Windows Logo appeared, a Blue Screen of Death flashed in front of me and system restarted again.

6. Now was the time to get serious. So I tried to keep my cool and did not let the negative thoughts in my mind take over me. I calmly chose the first option on boot menu, "Startup Recovery Mode".

7. And to my surprise, there was an error thrown during this process stating that it did not recognize my 2 HDDs. Ok, some thing is getting wrong now!

Precise Error Message:

"REM Couldn't perform screening because couldn't detect 2 HDD on this system"

Bang! Taken a back!

8. They say, "hope is good". So, I restarted the machine and once again chose the first option from Error Recovery Menu and it's almost like the system was waiting for me to do that. I was presented with the same error message once again!

Panic time yet? I said to myself, "Well this looks serious, but it is still possible to fix it"

9. As a next step, I restarted and hit the F2 key to enter the Safe Mode. While booting in Safe Mode, Win 7 shows you the list of all the system drivers it is loading. And bang! once again, another BSOD! I noticed that while it was trying to load the classpnp.sys driver, it hung. And then BSOD appeared!

Ok, losing my cool now. But in the midst of all this troubleshooting, I did not have the time to think of the consequences. You only think of them once the consequence itself is faced.

10. Going further, I rebooted and pressed F10 to enter the BIOS Menu. Seleted the Diagnostics Tab from the menu.

11. Time to test the Hard Drive for any errors. There are multiple tests provided by the machine for the hard drive. A Quick one and the other Full one.

12. HDD passed the quick test however in the full test I received this message at the end: "Hard Disk 1 Full (305)"

13. After looking up this code on the vendor's site, BOOM! All hope gone at once!

The vendor site said, Hard Disk needs to be replaced!

Lost my cool, panic time started.

The reason for panic was, I had the consequences right in front of me once I read the meaning of that error message. I had not taken any data backup!!

14. What am I going to do now?

15. Ok, so I had an Ubuntu 7.10 CD lying somewhere. I decided to boot using it as a Live CD. And following was the sequence:

fdisk -l

/dev/sda2 -> my hard disk (640 GB)

I felt safe :)

fdisk -s /dev/sda2

640 GB

Felt safe again.

cd /mnt
mkdir windows
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda2 /mnt/windows

ntfs-3g is not installed. You can install it by running the command:

apt-get install ntfs-3g

So, since I was using a Live CD. I could not connect to the net and download/install this package.

16. Next, I downloaded a System Rescue CD. Went outside, bought a couple of blank CDs and DVDs.

System Rescue CD is meant for such situations. Where you need to take a backup of your hard drive or if you want to create an image of the hard disk for some other purposes like forensics.

It comes installed with ntfs-3g and also has the mount point for windows (/mnt/windows) created. So, all you have to do is, mount your hard drive.

17. I booted my laptop using the System Rescue CD now.

After getting to the prompt, I typed in:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda2 /mnt/windows

What do you expect to see as the output?

If all goes well, you should be back at the prompt with no message displayed to you.

In my case, I was neither back at the prompt and neither was I presented with any error message.

"No, please, I hope it is not what I am thinking it is!". This is what was going on in my mind.

18. I closed my eyes and next when I looked at the console. I had a long array of messages stating that there appears to be a problem with the NTFS file system and I should check it with chkdsk utility of windows.

I knew the hard drive was gone.

This was really a hard day for me. It is hard to accept but I have no other option.

As a coincidence, I had it on my mind to take a backup of all the data on my hard drive, since it had been a while.

Infact, I had it planned for this weekend. But, I never got a chance to do it!

I can end up this article by stating a line said by Tyler Durden to Jack in the movie, Fightclub:

"The things you own end up owning you"