ECN Forum Forums Technical Discussion Re: Computers and the Internet Wow, that was close!

Hi Folks,
I came home from work the other day to find my W7 computer had shut itself down.
I keep this computer running 24/7 because it runs a lot of controls for my Ham radio gear, among other things, so it never gets turned off.

Anyhow, I restarted it and it got stuck in a start-up loop, stating that the registry was corrupt and Windows could not start.
So I put the disc in the DVD drive to try and repair the system, but all it would do is tell me the system needs to be repaired and it can't find the disc.

And then it got stuck in another loop trying to find the disc on start-up.
I'd backed up everything on this drive, just 3 days prior to this occurring, so I knew that I could do a clean install of the OS, this I then did, no worries at all.
Upon trying to re-load all of my documents and files to the drive, Windows told me it could not read the HDD it was meant to be sending the files to.
I replaced the drive with a new one, formatted it and then proceeded to add the files, this also failed, with a prompt coming up saying "This drive has not been formatted, please format it before continuing".
So I jumped through all the hoops and finally got the damned thing to format so that Windows would take all of the files.
One thing I must say is this, if you can't be bothered to back all your important stuff up, I have no sympathy for you, it's not that hard and if you have really important stuff on your computer like I do (work circuit diagrams, pictures of installs, records of what each customer has with respect to equipment), you've only got yourself to blame.
I mean storage is SO cheap these days, compared to how expensive it used to be, even 2-3 years ago and it's only going to get cheaper, but hey, don't buy the really cheap stuff, it's like not buying anything at all when it fails.

I keep a RAID 1 backup (mirrored) running on this machine all the time that has a copy of my data drive. I run Achronis running that keeps a live image of my C: on the backup and I back up the mirrored drive several times a month on an external drive that is stored in a fire safe. A lot of my stuff (music and movies) is also on other machines.
I was in the computer biz for 30 years and the most common call was a bad hard drive. That was where I learned, if it isn't backed up, it is gone.

Just FYI, that's a known glitch in one of the recent updates to W7 and there is a fix for it that doesn't involve reformatting your drive.