Disaster recovery #1
Today I visited a client with a Dell Optiplex GX260 who has a considerable investment in her data but had been unable to create a reliable backup using Norton 360's backup module. Boo for Norton!
On top of that her power supply had failed to the point that the PC was dead. Luckily she had an almost identical Dell GX 270 which we were able to use as a power supply donor. Some of you may know that these older Dells have a backplate which has cutouts in all the wrong places making a standard ATX PSU useless.
I once cut out an opening to accomodate a standard PSU & vowed never again so I guess fortune was on our side on this occasion.
So we now have power but the system is hanging at the desktop. Here's what I did...
- Booted from XP CD
- From recovery console, ran chkdsk /r - this constantly cycled back to 50% complete so gave up at that point
- Rebooted normally - success - chkdsk had repaired sufficently to give us a window to recover data
- Now confident that the disk was in a precarious condition, I removed the drive & placed it in a external USB enclosure to complete the recovery of the client's data which we had not immediately considered critical
Having returned the PSU to its donor, the client was advised to replace her computer for reasons of age & also partly to a rather common Dell error which reports an issue with the IDE controller at boot.
I'm opening a forum for you all to comment on these posts so dive in...!!!
Comments