Dell Crash, now stuck with complete reinstall. Has this ever happened to you?!

[billmcafee]

I’ve always loved my Dell systems, but I’m in a real bind right now. I’ve been working on a 17,000+ assembly and my hard drive just failed! I should have never bought the 1TB mechanical drive!!! I had everything on the same drive, both the OS and my data files. Fortunately I backed up to our network on Wednesday, but my system is still DOA. We have Pro Support from Dell, so they came out today to replace the hard drive, but now I have to reinstall everything from scratch including SolidWorks. I’m stuck working on my old POS machine until I get the other system up and running again. I hate computers so much! Any recommended shortcuts?

 

[Theophilus]

For the record, what was the make of the hard drive, and how old was it? (Western Digital seems to be the best I've experienced, though I have had one fail in the past.)

I've got a RAID 0 set-up here, meaning two real drives make up one virtual drive--doubling the chance of catastrophic failure. So I have nightly back-ups from the system drive to an internal back-up drive, and then a back-up from that internal back-up to an external back-up drive. This is scheduled, using an old version of SyncBack software.

Other than replacing your system drive and starting over, I don't know of a readily-available fix for this situation. Hope you didn't lose much.



Jeff Mowry

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

A people governed by fear cannot value freedom.

 

[MasterPhil]

Aw man,I’ve been there, and all too recently! The same exact thing happened to me last January. But my failure was on a Solid-State Hard Drive, so don’t feel too bad. It was time to upgrade anyway, but I was in the same boat and didn't know enough about tweaking the system for the best performance. So, the guys at Solid Box got us back up and running in less than 20 minutes. They originally talked us into buying a machine with two hard drives. The first is where we keep all the programs and the second is a large (500GB) drive where we keep all the data. (I can't believe it never occurred to me to separate the program and data files...duh) We’re a small engineering company, so we didn’t have a server. They sold us a fancy NAS drive and configured it so our “data files” get backed up twice every week.

When they sold us the computer we had them install SolidWorks, GibbsCAM, and our 3D scanner software. Not to mention, they made a backup image of the system and placed it on an external drive. When the hard drive failed they sent out a technician and she replaced the hard drive in a few minutes. I called Chris over at Solid Box and he helped me restore my computer in a matter of minutes. Fortunately all the pointers back to my data drive where still intact.

Even if you don't go this route, Chris is a very helpful guy. He talks too fast sometimes but I’ll bet he would give you some advice on how to best re-install and setup everything. It's worth a shot. We actually bought from them because our reseller recommended them and they helped us fix systems that we purchased from somewhere else. I don't usually post on forums, but when I get good customer service, I like to let people know about it. Good luck man...

 

[billmcafee]

Jeff,
It was a Western Digital VelociRaptor, I thought it was pretty high end, but I guess it just goes to show that anything you buy might crap out at any time...sad really.

Phil, Thanks for the heads up on the guys at Solidbox. I'll be sure to give them a call and see what they have to say. Based on their website prices, I may not be able to afford them, but still great to know about!

 

[GRF]

Hard drives fail all the time. They make millions of them a year. World class manufacturing is defined as 4,000 failures or less per million. If they make 10 million drives a year that is 40,000 hard drives that will fail early are made every year.

 

[MiketheEngineer]

You are F'ed. Just start re-installing.

You might be able to install the crashed drive as say drive "D" and still read some of the stuff....

 

[Theophilus]

Thanks, Bill. That's exactly the type of drive that failed on me, too (~300 GB, 10,000 rpm). Interesting, and good to know. As Roy found out, the light that burns twice as bright lasts half as long. Same issue?

As Phil says, the folks at SolidBox are great--I highly recommend them.



Jeff Mowry

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

A people governed by fear cannot value freedom.

 

[billmcafee]

So here's the update on this little situation. Dell came out and took care of the faulty drive, but they had no idea what to do with Solidworks and a lot of other programs. I suppose it's not their fault, they deal with hardware... but I took Phil's suggestion and called Solidbox and 30 minutes later, I was ready to roll and SW has never run smoother. So, thanks, Phil, everything you said was correct about Solidbox. and they set me up with the most recent the service pack as well. I guess that's pretty standard for those guys. I didn't buy a new computer, but I think I know where I'm going when I do. My fingers are crossed that I won't need an upgrade this year though.