Spent all day long yesterday trying to help a friend retrieve some files off a "dead" hard drive. It was dead as in "Doesn't boot Windows anymore" and "occasionally has bad sectors when you try to read a file".
I am now realizing I went about it all wrong. Lessons learned include:
Anyway, bottom line, main lesson to learn: don't copy over the net when you can just transplant the hard drive.
I am now realizing I went about it all wrong. Lessons learned include:
- It might be worth having a 100MBps hub around the house, and a computer with an IDE interface and 100MBps ethernet.
- If you've got an intermittent hard drive, you can put it in another system to make backups, but don't copy files to another laptop when the drive could just as easily be the secondary drive in the system once you install an OS on a *new* drive.
- If you buy a system without restoration disks, but with instructions to make restoration disks, do that first, and save them
- If they're going to leave the laptop behind running an scp all afternoon and evening long, they should tell you the password to log back in so that if it enters power-saver mode, you can get in, disable power-saver, and resume the copy.
- Knoppix is da bomb.
- I forget, I'm sure I had more of these
Anyway, bottom line, main lesson to learn: don't copy over the net when you can just transplant the hard drive.
Comments
Lession 2 is the Huge Win. We wouldn't have had to fight with slow zipping or with slow scping.
Do you think that the scp didn't finish? I checked that there were some files, but I didn't check to make sure that they all made it across.
Which may be more relivant than I'd like as the machine is not booting again. How much is a cool Mac laptop these days?