mtwalsh367
Member
My HA computer (running HomeSeer, Powerhome, USBUIRT, Virtual Weather Station, my home web site) had a hard drive failure last week. My first thoughts were holy crap this is going to take weeks of work to recover from. I do have backups but we all know that this only eases the pain because you still have to reinstall, etc.
Well long story short, my backups were all up to date and once I got my PC operating system loaded it took less then 4 hours to have everything back up and running good as new. My wife was actually impressed and this says alot. She has grown accustomed to all the automation and was nagging me to get it fixed. She even suggested we just go get a new computer instead of fixing the old one I was running.
Here is a summary of any interesting information and tips that helped with the recovery:
- My HA computer was very old so I just opted to trash it and get a new computer versus just getting a new hard drive. This was probably the most painful part because I got a good deal on a duo core HP open box item but it was set up with Vista. Not wanting to deal with incompatibilities with Vista and various hardware/software I'm runnning I wiped the system clean and installed XP Pro. HP doesn't make this easy because they don't tell you what drivers you need for XP so you have to do some investigating and guesswork to get basic things working (like the network card).
- I added a second identical hard drive to the system and set this up as a mirrored raid configuration. I will continue to keep back ups but this set up should minimize the pain of a hard drive failure in the future. I have never really tested mirroring before and assume it works well.
- I kept my backups on an external hard drive so recovering the various system and program files was a snap. I kept a backup of my important program directories as well as the most recent application setup files and patches.
- I installed my applications and then just overlayed my backup files in the proper configuration directores. For the most part this worked well.
- I did find that I had several things that I had to go reload that I didn't have backed up. Such as USBUIRT drivers, several windows DLLs that had been installed with various HomeSeer plug ins, etc.
Well long story short, my backups were all up to date and once I got my PC operating system loaded it took less then 4 hours to have everything back up and running good as new. My wife was actually impressed and this says alot. She has grown accustomed to all the automation and was nagging me to get it fixed. She even suggested we just go get a new computer instead of fixing the old one I was running.
Here is a summary of any interesting information and tips that helped with the recovery:
- My HA computer was very old so I just opted to trash it and get a new computer versus just getting a new hard drive. This was probably the most painful part because I got a good deal on a duo core HP open box item but it was set up with Vista. Not wanting to deal with incompatibilities with Vista and various hardware/software I'm runnning I wiped the system clean and installed XP Pro. HP doesn't make this easy because they don't tell you what drivers you need for XP so you have to do some investigating and guesswork to get basic things working (like the network card).
- I added a second identical hard drive to the system and set this up as a mirrored raid configuration. I will continue to keep back ups but this set up should minimize the pain of a hard drive failure in the future. I have never really tested mirroring before and assume it works well.
- I kept my backups on an external hard drive so recovering the various system and program files was a snap. I kept a backup of my important program directories as well as the most recent application setup files and patches.
- I installed my applications and then just overlayed my backup files in the proper configuration directores. For the most part this worked well.
- I did find that I had several things that I had to go reload that I didn't have backed up. Such as USBUIRT drivers, several windows DLLs that had been installed with various HomeSeer plug ins, etc.