Computer go BOOM
So I wake up yesterday and "head into the office" to find my workstation says its 5:27AM and is frozen. Ok, no biggie. I reset the box. about 5 mins after I'm into some emails, i hear a CLUNK from my hard drive. I think "damn, there goes my HD" obviously. So I boot it up again, kill almost every program, and proceed to do a dump of the image. About 4 hours later, its at 98%, and the status bar disappears. I assume its done. So I start testing the image, and I find I cant make a Norton Ghost 9 boot disk for myself! I find one online using my laptop, boot the box w/ it, try to read the image, and it only reads ".gho" images, IE Ghost 2003/8.0 or less. So I start looking for a Ghost 9 boot cd, luckily, torrent isn't illegal :)
I boot into that, see my image, and its corrupt. YEY! Thankfully, I have a July 12th image. So I go buy a hard drive (officemax 300 gig seagate for 129 - 15% "brownbag sale" + 8.25% tax). Pop the drive in my box, boot up with the ghost disk, try and read the 7/12 image, and it says it cant find a hard drive. DAMN, my motherboard or cable! swap out the cable, same story. So its 8:15, Fry's closes at 9. I get there around 8:50, and the cpu/mb combo I want is sold out. I end up w/ a abit NF-9f and an AMD Athlon 64 3500+. Bring it home, put in my case, put new HD on, it works. So then I begin a disk clone from the old drove to the new drive, knowing Windows will do crazy w/ new motherboard and controllers. It told me it would take 18hrs. So at 5pm today, I'll have a clone HD and the windows fun begins! Some nifty sites I found on the way are the ultimate boot cd and the ultimate boot cd for windows. its a shame I couldn't get this to work with ghost9, only ghost8.
UPDATE:
Windows Genuine Advantage is an annoying PIA. The cloned image said it wasn't genuine, plus the windows install wouldn't recognize the new board/proc. Re-installed windows. That full dump image ended up not being corrupt. So I proceeded with restoring my "Documents and Settings," then doing the "reinstall program, restore files from backup to the newly installed directory" trick for two days. I think im about 95% back to normal. UGH
Moral of the story is.... your backup image? don't count on it for a bare-metal recovery, as technology changes so much you'll end up upgrading your equipment and the image wont work properly anyways. Have a full backup every 2 weeks, monthly doesnt cut it.