A friend of mine, an inexperienced computer user with a ten month old Dell, has run into some major problems. Attempting to restart his machine at one point last night, he couldn't reach his hard drive, getting a blue screen with an error message about it not starting-up in order to prevent injury to the drive. He called Dell tech support who had him restart the machine and hit F12 so as to access a diagnostic program of theirs. The test results: a failed drive, toasted forever it would seem. Dell promised to dispatch a technician with a replacement drive right away, but all of their attempts at efficiency miss the point. My friend has never backed up the data on his computer even though there is important accounting data on the drive. He's asked me to help with a recovery.
Considering the foregoing, I've made certain that he knows to delay the submission of the defective drive until a few days after the tech installs the new one. That way I can connect the old drive as slave to the motherboard and, after doing a reinstall of XP on the new one with their restoration CD, attempt to reach it after booting from a Linux rescue CD and running dd if=/dev/hdb of=/dev/hda. Now I know that in running a copy I have a significant risk of not recovering the old data at all, but if I do not try an approach of this kind, my friend has no chance whatsoever of getting his Quickbooks data without a painstaking attempt to extract the appropriate files after locating them one-by-one on the faulty drive and burning them to a CD. With the possibility that shared files might be involved somehow, the task of picking through the files and folders related to QuickBooks seems even more problematic. In any case, not my idea of a pleasantly spent evening. I can use some ideas at this point, on how I might improve upon my approach as there are almost certainly improvements to be made. Thoughts? I'd appreciate them.
Regards.
LavrentiBeria
Considering the foregoing, I've made certain that he knows to delay the submission of the defective drive until a few days after the tech installs the new one. That way I can connect the old drive as slave to the motherboard and, after doing a reinstall of XP on the new one with their restoration CD, attempt to reach it after booting from a Linux rescue CD and running dd if=/dev/hdb of=/dev/hda. Now I know that in running a copy I have a significant risk of not recovering the old data at all, but if I do not try an approach of this kind, my friend has no chance whatsoever of getting his Quickbooks data without a painstaking attempt to extract the appropriate files after locating them one-by-one on the faulty drive and burning them to a CD. With the possibility that shared files might be involved somehow, the task of picking through the files and folders related to QuickBooks seems even more problematic. In any case, not my idea of a pleasantly spent evening. I can use some ideas at this point, on how I might improve upon my approach as there are almost certainly improvements to be made. Thoughts? I'd appreciate them.
Regards.
LavrentiBeria
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