I had a hard drive get reformatted. I say “got” reformatted because I am still not real sure what happened. It was February 28th 2010 I was sitting in my living room watching Jimmy Johnson chase Jeff Gordon in the Shelby American at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. It was also the last day of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. I was curious how the U.S. Men’s Hockey team was doing and grabbed my laptop to check. I launched Google Chrome, I was evaluating it for a possible switch and I got page cannot be displayed message. The wireless was not seeing any networks. No big deal, I have had this happen a couple of times in the past when coming out of hibernation.

As the machine was shutting down I got up, went to the bathroom and headed into the kitchen for a drink. When I came back into the room and looked at the screen I felt woozy and threw up a little in the back of my throat. HP recovery was copying files. I knew the first thing it does is format the drive. Sure enough it had reformatted my drive. On top of that I was getting errors about corrupt files on the recovery.

I stopped the recovery and pulled the drive. There was nothing I could do right then, I didn’t have any way to hook the drive to another computer. The next day I bought a USB adapter to connect the drive up my wife’s desktop. Her machine was locking up every couple of minutes. It would not stay running long enough to download any recovery utilities let alone install them. I went and bought her a new machine.

900 dollars and a brutal fight with unsigned drivers on Windows 7 64bit later, about 11 O’Clock at night, I was finally able to look on the drive. I was not able to save anything. I tried 10 different recovery software. I got some bits and pieces, but it honestly looked like something had randomly over written 20% of all the files I wanted. I had never seen anything like it.

After passing through all five stages of grief in what was truly one of the worst nights of my life, I accepted the loss and started the process of rebuilding the machine. I know some people will shake their heads at what I am about to tell you next, but I put the same drive back in my machine. It passed all the disk check tests both manufacturer and BIOS, so it was not the drive that was the issue. I am an optimist and live by the axiom that nothing on a computer can really be explained until it happens more than once.

The recovery still failed when launched from the recovery partition. No problem, I made recovery CD’s when I got the machine. I even knew where they were! I use a straightened paper clip to open the CD door, yea it’s broken too, and popped in disc one. Error reading drive. Interesting. I used the straightened paper clip again and put the CD in my wife’s old machine that I had set up next to me. Oh yea, it was the USB wireless that caused the locking up. I Put it on Ethernet and no more lock ups. I put the CD in and got continual CRC errors. At this point I just laughed and went to bed.

The Next day I tried a Windows XP SP1 CD I had. Windows ccouldn’t see the Hard drive to install on. I needed the SATA driver. yea. I went to HP’s website and downloaded the driver. It would only install to a floppy. I haven’t had a floppy in years. I scrounged a recovery CD for an earlier model of the laptop. No SATA driver. I went into the BIOS and disabled SATA for the drive and was able to install windows. It ran like a 486. It took 3 hours to install SQL Server 2005. That just wouldn’t work.

I still had a copy of the i386 folder in the recovery partition. I figured I should be able to make an install CD from it. I copy this to my other machine and built an install CD from it. That was pretty cool actually. No luck though, no driver. So, I hit google again. My idea wass to extract the driver and slipstream it into the install CD I created from the i386 folder. It took two specialized pieces of software to extract the driver and then I was able to slip stream it and SP2 into an install CD.

Success! I am typing away on the laptop right now. I happen to be on an Amtrak train going from New York to Washington DC. Office is installed, but my plan is to move to google docs. With the addition of offline mode, I think I may be able to do it. Offline mode will allow me to work on docs and then they will synchronize when I have a connection. So for so good.

I am still looking for a free backup solution for everything else. I like the Google docs offline mode model. I don’t want to have to do anything for the backup to happen. I know carbonite and other pay services work this way, but I am cheap. I want to figure out a  way to do it for free.