Recovering Data from Windows Crash

I was recently approached for assistance with getting an older machine that refused to boot Windows back online. I’ve made the point pretty strongly that I don’t do Windows anymore, in particular because system recovery from catastrophic events is tedious, time consuming, often incomplete, and provides no guarantee that it won’t happen again. And now, thanks to WGA, catastrophic events are even more frequent than when we just had viruses to contend with.

Most of my clients seem to believe there’s some magic wand or setting it takes to bring things back, and few are willing, or able, to provide compensation for the hours of work it takes, much less have the technical ability to keep things in a working state after I’ve left them — even with training. They lack disclipline nor see the need, figuring if it goes south, I’m on call. Well. I’m not.

The real hitch is when you’re dealing with kind old ladies or close relatives. While you want to help them, often you can’t. Support and licensing models have changed. Gone are the days of simply fixing a machine even if they have the disc on the table. MS doesn’t support the older operating systems like they do XP, clients often can’t afford what you recommend to them as the bare minimum needed, and even if they could, their computer can’t run the new stuff… and an expensive new computer is out of the question. Microsoft’s executive staff may be made of money, but students, elderly, young parents, and average American families are not. A machine is big investment, so is the OS, and they expect it to last for over a decade.

In this one case, however, we had the system restoration disks from the OEM vendor, but the problem there was that a restoration would wipe out the data on the drive. Not good.

Apple, bless their heart, allows you to archive your whole system, and install on the same drive as your data without losing it. No such luck here. This was Windows. Licensing, not technology, was getting in the way.

The solution, it turned out, was to simply move the data to another Windows XP box. The way we’d do that, since he couldn’t boot, would be to pop the IDE drive out and use a BYTECC BT-200 USB 2.0 TO IDE converter. Oh, you want one. I own two. This thing makes an internal IDE drive mountable as easily as a USB thumb drive.

And so we did. However, when we plugged his drive into a working XP box, we did not get the result I’d seen every time before. What we got was disk spinning, blinking lights, and a Windows box stating the drive could not be mounted.

We even tried another USB port. Same thing. XP could not read this drive, and the most likely suspicion was a hard drive failure.

But, on the off chance, I suggested we try something. We simply moved the USB connector from the XP box to the Mac OS X box. Within a second the drive mounted perfectly. What was this? XP couldn’t read a Microsoft formatted drive, but OS X could? Yes, OS X saved the day. Again.

We proceeded to copy everything off the drive onto the Mac without incident. Just for fun we put it back on XP. Same deal, XP couldn’t mount it. And, this was a fully patched high end XP system.

Meanwhile, back on the Mac we reorganized the files, ran a few shell scripts to automated the sorting and pruning process, and when done burned three cross-platform DVDs.

Please don’t quote me for saying this, but it was the first time ever that data recovery was actually… dare I say, …fun. I don’t mean like, “oh it worked and we didn’t lose a thing”, as I’ve done that zillions of times before, but no, I mean like enjoyable play kinda fun.

The next thought was to put the drive back in the old box and reformat it with the OEM disk, and bring the data back. However, I was stopped in my tracks. It seemed a trip to the Apple store was suddenly in our future. For, if data recovery was the easy and enjoyable, imagine what working in an environment like that would be.

As for the old box? I suspect very soon wit will be running a copy of Xandros, a Linux distribution that is designed for Windows users to run Windows programs.