Bought a new Dell computer last month to replace my 5 year old laptop because the hard drive had failed. See Death of a Hard Drive.

I spent the last month reinstalling all my software and trying to recover my data from one place or another with acceptable, but time-consuming, results.

The day after I finished, the hard drive on my new computer crashed. My computer was running impossibly slow and when I ran a hard drive self test, got error code 2000-0146.

Called Dell and they immediately said I had to replace the hard drive. They mailed a hard drive to a local technician. He came to my house and put it in my computer.

The hard drive was pre-loaded so it automatically reinstalled Windows when it started.

I have spent the last week reinstalling programs and data.

There were two cool, useful things that helped.

1. My computer would not reboot from the hard drive, so I downloaded Ubuntu, burned it to a CD and booted from the CD to be able to get some of my hard drive data. See Ubuntu to the Hard Disk Data Rescue.

2. I had set up my computer to use Windows Live Mesh to synchronize some folders on my computer with the Mesh online desktop. It worked and I was able to recover some files that were no where else. See Windows Live Mesh for data backup.

By Andrew Weitzen (c) 2010

Weitzen is the publisher of several online Internet journals including: InternetHandholding.com, DomainNames.gs, DotNetNuke.bz, Programmer.bz, Software.vg, WebHosting.vg