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Von WC Ohio

Posted 12/5/2020 14:01 (#8647532)
Subject: Lost hard drive followup thanks H3f

From the previous post

https://talk.newagtalk.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=962120

Windows 7 drive was unrecognized by machine in any way. I plugged in my cloned drive to see that it only got me back to around March of 2019 as far as settings, programs, updates pics saved files etc. Due to being laid up all winter of 2019 following ACL surgery and rehab I relied on the computer heavily and did not want to risk running a backup and having anything go wrong. 2020 slid on by and while I thought about it several times I had not gotten around to it.

I had taken lots of pictures of many of my projects and such and I had saved many GB of videos and info on Covid stuff plus presentations, podcasts and the like which I feared would all be unrecoverable.

Thanks to H3f's advice and emails I downloaded and burned an ISO copy of Linux Mint and was able to boot from that and load the Mint operating system. It was able to see the corrupted windows drive and see the folders I wanted to save. I tried copying a few to a flash drive and it worked but was painfully slow. Something along the speed of 200kb/sec. I was not sure how it utilized memory to run Mint so I ended up buying a blank new hard drive and installing Linux Mint on it. I was a bit fearful as I wondered if it would change things to the point I could not plug the working cloned Windows 7 drive back in and run it.

It took a while to fully install Linux Mint and it seems okay but not quite as handy as I was unfamiliar with it's features shortcuts etc. It too was able to view and read the files on the corrupted Windows 7 drive attached to the SATA cable and power adapter.

I decided I would try and salvage as much as possible from the corrupted Windows 7 drive by copying files to the Mint drive first. That was a painfully slow process. I ended up running the corrupted drive while sitting on an ice pack to keep it cool which seemed to help performance a bit. Speeds were all over the place sometimes transferring as fast as 20-50 Mbps others as slow as 20 Kbps. Huge amount of time required as it would occasionally find a file it could not read or recover. Instead of selecting skip all I would just select skip and write the file name down. That was a pain as you might lose hours of run time if it encountered an error right after you checked in on it then left for several hours to do something else.

I would then go back and try and copy those files individually. Most of the time they would then transfer but a few seemed corrupted. In the end I think I captured at least 98% of all that I hoped to recover.

Once on the Linux hard drive I copied them to USB sticks which went quite a bit faster.

Plugged in my cloned Windows 7 drive and powered it up and copied everything off the USB flash drives. Took a lot of searching out the tweaks and fixes I had used to get things like I wanted. Also took a little searching but was able to drill down and capture my Thunderbird email folders and copy them back into the profile folder on the Windows 7 cloned drive.

Been a long ordeal and hassle but good experience and lessons learned. I've already cloned the Windows 7 drive to another backup hard drive and will probably do 1 more just to make sure.

Through all of this I talked with my nephew who recently built his own new Windows 10 computer.

I think we are going to try and build a Windows 10 machine for me.

A couple question on this.

Can you still clone an entire drive with Windows 10 operating system or have they somehow changed this so that it senses the original drive only and will not run if cloned ?

Where can one get a hard copy of Office 2019 without requiring the annual subscription? I have no interest in being held hostage for annual renewals.

The Mint system had a version of office programs with it and I opened and used a few of those. They seem much the same. I'm not tied to needing MS Office but do worry about compatibility when sharing files with others that use office.

Thanks to everyone that replied and offered suggestions and tips it was all very helpful.

A few of those pics I saved.