It started a few days ago when I turned on the PC. Booted normally, but the Start Windows sound was under water. This held true for all audio (MP3s, web streams, Youtube and so on.) At first I thought a sound driver might be corrupt, but I also noticed other odd symptoms: the mouse lagged and the cursor stuck occasionally. A virus? No warnings from Nod32, so I ran CCleaner first and was about to start Malwarebytes, when I got the answer: Windows error popped up “Delay write failed” while CCleaner was deleting temp files. Oh-oh! While just the partition might be corrupt, I started to worry about the hard drive–a 160GB PATA. This is my basic work, email, Outlook, and small business PC. It’s a Socket 462 Athlon XP (Abit KV7-V) so no speed demon– just a functional desktop. And it’s also not backed up!

I do have a 500GB SATA drive in a hot-swap bay, but I use that for temporary backups of customer data, not my own.  Every once in a while, I’ll securely erase that drive. I just need to plug in another SATA to run my own backup every few days. But it’s a case of do as I say, not as I do. I had a 320GB SATA drive handy, so I booted Acronis Drive Image and tried to clone the primary IDE to SATA in the hotswap bay. No dice– Acronis couldn’t see the drive. I rebooted a couple times to ssee if the Via RAID would detect the new drive and… no it didn’t. So, I plugged the 320GB SATA into a USB adapter and booted Acronis. At first, no detection, but replugging the USB found it. I started the cloning operation. After five minutes it showed a read error. First I clicked retry a couple times– no dice. So I clicked Ignore All, and proceeded to clone for about an hour. Finished, and then plugged the SATA into SATA 1, with the hot swap bay at SATA 2 (only two SATA ports on this board.)  Arggh! DISK ERROR–OPERATING SYSTEM NOT FOUND.

Ouch! OK, I figured I’d [1] get the VIA SATA drivers, and [2] maybe update the BIOS. Meanwhile, I plugged the bad PATA into a spare box with a good 200GB PATA drive and ran Acronis again to clone IDE master to slave. Started this around 10 p.m. It still read 2 hours remaining when I went to bed at 3 a.m. (Thinking to myself– this ain’t gonna work!)

This a.m. it was done, and I plugged in then 200GB drive. Read Error on drive 0. Still not out of the woods. OK let’s try this: got the 320GB SATA and put it on USB adaptor, leaving the newly cloned 200GB PATA in primary IDE. Now try a manual clone from USB drive to primary IDE (hoping the original clone to SATA drive, ignoring the errors, produced a decent enough image.) This time it took just over an hour. Plugged in the new IDE drive and booted up: Saved by the bell! Everything’s back!

The lesson for me is: do as I say and backup! Tonight I’m putting the 320GB SATA into hot swap bay and backing up all my crap.