How to Backup Your Failed Hard Drive
For anyone dealing with a problem like this in the future there are actually a couple ways I would suggest fixing it. Especially if the hard drive only thinks it's toast. I don't know why the mod would say the HDD is toast when the first thing stated was that it was believed that the drive was throwing a false positive. Mods really ought to read the full post before comment. Standards are higher for them.
No matter what, if you are in a jam with your HDD you are going to want a backup if you don't already have one I think everyone by now has experienced life with a failed drive and a backup that just isn't recent enough so the whole "Tsk Tsk" routine really ought to have played it's way out of our systems by now (maybe those people have human HDD errors).
Backup Method 1:
Materials:
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Give the friend the drink because they've agreed to let you borrow their Backed-Up Hard Drive to boot from.
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When you start the computer you should immediately see an instruction to hit either F12 or esc. hit it (if you need to restart don't worry, it's a quick little bugger sometimes)
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you will now see a few options displayed, select the option to boot from USB.
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You should now be loading from our friend's hard drive. This may feel weird because they may not have all the drivers for your machine. That's ok, we can live with that. (Since they backed up their drive before handing it to you the option to install drivers is there if you really want to)
Now the main drive will act as storage if it is only a hard drive fault and not completely fried. You'll be able to make CD's or backup to cloud storage if available. But if you're feeling nostalgic Hehe...
Backup Method 2:
(Bonus: You don’t get the death penalty if it turns out you have a virus)
Same but grab a USB drive and turn it into a boot drive. Here are some resources that have the software and some instructions.
Edited by AngelXAces, 19 July 2017 - 10:26 PM.